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Our Seyval Blanc crop was demolished by birds this year. We're new to all of this, and they caught us off guard. We were ready to write that block off for the year. However, there are a lot of secondary clusters that have been maturing over the last month or so. Most are up around 18 brix...

Thanks for the input, folks. Sorry I haven't replied, but we've taken your suggestions as valuable input and changed strategy a little. We still want to experiment this round. But instead of doing a large batch of MLF, we just pulled off about 15% into one of my old homebrew conicals to see...

We're actually moving from the Texas Hill Country to Iowa. But the guy who spearheads VVA, Fritz, is now based out of Texas. He has a lot of Texan clients, so it may be an especially good resource for your particular challenges.

Thanks, great advice. I'm not opposed to using potassium carbonate, and I think I might lean toward that, rather than back-sweetening. We're not going to be able to sell this wine, so it's more about coming up with a procedure for next year when we are commercially licensed. I have K carb on...

We took over this vineyard earlier this year, and have been learning everything we can as fast as we can. The local winery we thought was going to buy our La Crescent ended up having too much already. And while we found some other buyers, we were going to lose money on the deal getting the...

See I was just wondering about this. It's so common for brewers to repitch yeast from the bottom of a tank that's just finished fermenting, but do winemakers even do that? Maybe it's not so common because the fermentations all happen simultaneously or very close to one another due to harvest...

Thanks! I was wondering how long you could refrigerate clusters before they got slimy. But I have a big empty cheat freezer, if freezing clusters works. We'll need to get some picked or dropped this weekend. A lot are good to hand a while longer. We had some inconsistency, because we were...

Thanks, we're prepared for it to be a lot of work. And that's okay. The big challenge this year was coming into it late and not being here all the time. So when we were here, it was trying to pack three weeks of work into one. Looking forward to being permanent residents to spread out the...

No, we're out in Knoxville, actually.

This is all really great information, thank you very much for taking the time to respond. I wouldn't see doing this for our red variety at all, just the whites. And fortunately, the three varieties we have (Chancellor, Seyval Blanc, and La Crescent), each about two acres, are maturing at...

I'm curious whether there's any reason not to use conical jacketed beer fermenters for white wines. They wouldn't be practical for wines on skins. But for just fermenting white juice, it seems like they might be a good option, no? As long as there's an access port of some kind on top?

Thanks! We're actually moving to Iowa from Central Texas, not too far from you.

Yeah, it's been a firehose in the face, especially since we were/are in a gradual transition from Texas. So we weren't able to be here all the time this Spring. That made it really hard to get sprays in on time and tend to the vineyards the way we needed to. We were always playing frantic...

Hi, everyone. Brand new member...recent vineyard owner/manager...experienced with brewing, but new to winemaking. As a newbie, I don't mind asking stupid questions, and I have a couple such questions. But they are unrelated, so I will ask them in two separate threads. Here's the first...

Thanks, Bob. Looking forward to getting some inout on a few questions. Cheers!

Hey, folks. New to Iowa, new to vineyards, and new to winemaking. At the beginning of the year, we purchased a property outside of Des Moines that has six acres of wine vineyards. Our original goal was to open a very small destination brewery and experiment with beer-wine hybrids. We'd be...