New Winemakers and Backyard Viticulturists

Diane Rudnick · Sep 18, 2019

We are Diane & Ron Rudnick of Liberty Lake Washington (Between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene ID)

We are growing 50 vines split between 2 varietals:
25 Pinot Noir Precoce
25 Chardonnay Wente 72

We affectionately are calling our wine and vineyard CRAP Wine Cellars or crapwinecellars.com - although we are not a commercial venture, just hobbyists.
CRAP stands for Cheap Retired Airline Pilot !!

The vines are in year 3 and we plan to give it a go this year. We are a month into Veraison but Brix is still about 17-19º so we will wait another couple of weeks before picking.

We are also planning a trip this fall so starting fermentation is not viable and we plan on crushing/de stemming and freezing our lot of Pinot Noir must until we are ready for it.

For practice .. and to have a comparison we purchased 5 gallons of frozen must from Brehm Vineyards of Pinot Noir from the Columbia Valley. We are currently processing MLF on 3 gallons + 1 bottle after primary and racking off the gross lees.

We bought a crusher/destemmer, a Blickmann Wineasy fermenter and press and the Vinmetrica SC300 and SC55 analysis kits for So2, pH, TA nd MLF.

We’re reading a lot, scouring the internet, watching YouTube and taking advice wherever we can. Just stumbled on this site today.

dralarms · Sep 18, 2019

Welcome to winemakingtalk

mainshipfred · Sep 18, 2019

Welcome, be a little careful with YouTube videos. Depending on which ones you are watching there is a lot of misinformation.

Diane Rudnick · Sep 18, 2019

Yes, we take it all in with a grain of salt. Mostly we watch videos from Vinmetrica showing us how to use their analysis equipment and from others learning how to properly sanitize equipment, etc. There are many differences of opinions on winemaking.. that’s for sure.