Alright so I tried these lights out and I really couldn't tell if they worked as there is so much damage on the grapes already that it's too hard to tell if there's any new damage day to day, but based purely on how they look when their on at night I think these things are useless so I sent them back. They barely illuminate any area at all, and apparently per the instructions I need to place 4 of them facing outward around each vine to keep rodents away, which is nuts as a 4 pack is $40, so if I want to protect all 30 of my vines I need to spend $1,200...not a chance.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...e_1?smid=A65U3YUOD16AA&th=1&tag=forumyield-20
On a side note, given that we've just had a crazy 7 day heatwave here (complete with daily brush fires of course) I was checking brix and the zin hit 25, so I just harvested and crushed today. Boy was this a painful and disturbing crush. In the past 4 seasons since I started making wine, I've never once washed my grapes before crush, as I've read somewhere that it messes with the terroir plus it can cause wild fermentation and will water down the must / affect the PH.
Well once I saw all the mouse shit left behind in the harvest bucket when I dumped the grapes to another bucket there was no way I was going to make wine with these grapes without washing and sanitizing them thoroughly. So I made a 3 gallon solution of tap water with 6 oz of K-Meta and spent 3 hours rigorously double-washing every single cluster of 53 lbs of zin, while also hand picking off any damaged / party bitten grapes. Then just before crushing and after letting the k-meta washed grapes sit for a half hour in separate clean buckets I then rinsed every single cluster in fresh water, shaking and dipping rigorously to knock loose any remaining rodent crap and rinse off the excess k-meta. The entire process, plus crushing by hand because I don't have a de-stemmer / crusher, took me 9 hours. After the final rinse, I didn't see any rodent droppings accumulating in the bottom of the rinse bucket, so although I know it's impossible that I got every last one, I at least got most of them rinsed off. I'm hoping that the 2 oz per gallon k-meta solution was sufficient to kill whatever they may have left behind, but honestly I'm not planning to even risk tasting this wine until it's gone through full AF and bulk aged for 9 months along with multiple rackings, so hopefully that will be enough to ensure I'm not drinking some disgusting rodent disease.
If there's one thing I've learned in the few years I've been making wine, it's that if I threw away the grapes / wine instead of finishing it every time things don't go my way in the vineyard or the wine making process, I'd never have made a single bottle, as there is ALWAYS something that goes wrong. Case in point, in 2022 I picked Petit Syrah from a couples' property in Temecula, the berries were large and bunched up in really tight clusters. When I got home and started crushing, there was live earwigs flowing up to the top of the bucket like crazy. I removed every earwig I saw immediately, then the next day after 24 hours of pectic enzyme working on the must I picked out a bunch of dead earwigs off the top, then pitched yeast. The following subsequent days I picked out 30 to 40 dead earwigs in a 6 gallon bucket over the course of primary, it was nasty and unnerving. But I didn't throw out the wine, and to be honest actually it's pretty darn good now, it doesn't have any off or "vegetal" flavors as described in some of the horror stories I read online, so I suppose I got enough of them out.
So anyway, going forward I'm going to attempt to continuously control the rodent population in my yard, first by trying the ratx stuff, hopefully this does the trick!
https://ecoclearproducts.com/collections/ratx
