Date: Feb-Mar 2018
Recipes of Burgundy
MEMBERS ONLYIf you’ve ever visited Burgundy, France, then you likely know all about how important pairing the right wine and food dish are. Here, we share recipes for a three-course meal as well as their perfect pairings for your Burgundian-style wines.
Field Blending
MEMBERS ONLYBlends are most often made from varietal wines prior to bottling, but field blending, where all of the varieties are harvested and fermented together, has its own benefits.
Submerge Those Oak Chips, Wine Yields and a Copper Problem
MEMBERS ONLYI actually prefer using a sock or some kind of bag rather than just having chips float loose on the surface.
Dealing With A Copper Problem
MEMBERS ONLYThat’s too bad that you added more copper sulfate than you intended to. Copper is an effective, legal, and ancient (the Romans knew about its curative powers in winemaking) tool for reducing (no pun intended) stinky rotten egg defects. Hydrogen sulfide is often the culprit and ionic copper, delivered in the form of copper sulfate
Wine Flirtation Gets Serious
FREEMost winemakers can trace their roots of making wine to either wine appreciation or their family. When the Milam family purchased a house with an established vineyard, the two themes combined, pushing the family from enophiles to dedicated vineyard managers and winemakers.
Winemaking Outside of Harvest
MEMBERS ONLYLots of home winemakers concentrate their efforts in tune with the natural seasons. They make all of their wine in the harvest months of August, September, and October using seasonally available just-picked wine grapes. (Full disclosure: That is my most frequent pattern, too. I live in Sonoma County, California, and have a hobby vineyard in
Fires in California’s Wine Country
MEMBERS ONLYFor one week in October, portions of California’s wine country were up in flames in what has been deemed the state’s most destructive and costly fire. Beyond the toll it took on countless families whose homes were destroyed and lives uprooted, questions also arose regarding the fire’s impact on the 2017 vintage.
Vine Clones
MEMBERS ONLYProduced from just a mother vine, grapevine clones are intended to assure growers the grapes produced will have a predictable characteristic. But is it really that simple? Wes Hagen weighs in on why clone selection may not be as important as varietal selection.
Small Space Viticulture
MEMBERS ONLYAlthough the best part of visiting a winery is the wine, I have to admit I love spending time in or near the actual vineyard. A vineyard in full leaf with beautiful juicy grapes hanging about can be a very cool place to relax. I am also intrigued by how vineyards develop, particularly when green-space
2018 Label Contest Winners
FREESure, what’s inside the bottle may be the most important part of winemaking, but the presentation of your homemade wines tells others that your wine is important to you, that you’ve spent
Carignane/Mazuelo: A Spanish grape with many names
MEMBERS ONLYMany wine grapes have different names when grown in various parts of the world. That is especially true for Carignane, which is officially called Mazuelo in its homeland of Spain. Find out how both viticulturalists and enologists handle this unique grape.
Submerge Those Oak Chips
FREEI love your innovation. A “chip sock” can be a real boon to winemakers. In fact, I mention using one in The Winemaker’s Answer Book where I suggest using a nylon stocking
Fining for Beginners
FREELearn the ins and outs of fining wine and the options to choose from.
Home Wine Lab Testing: Tips from the Pros
FREELaboratory equipment for winemakers can be fiscally daunting, especially for beginning winemakers. That doesn’t mean that vital testing should be avoided. We asked two laboratory experts in wine lab services companies about
Wine Yields From a Vineyard
MEMBERS ONLYAs one of my vineyard manager co-workers famously says just about every other day whenever he answers a question like this, “It depends.” However, before I dive into all of the prevarications and provisos, here are some basic conversion assumptions for grape growing and wine production. These are handy facts to memorize so hopefully you