Newbie From Northwest Florida

Hello everybody,

I just recently got into home wine making, with the goal of mainly using wild type fruits from my locality to make wine. I learned programming, engineering, and physics all from forums, so I figured a wine making forum would be a good step in this venue as well. I am a Chemist and Microbiologist (people don't accept degrees from forums so I went to college for this) and couldn't imagine any greater hobby to combine my knowledge and skills than wine making.

I'm still working on my first batch of wine, from wild type Rubus fruit (Dewberry and Blackberry) in my area, thus my username. I built a whole lab setup for making wine on my patio, climatically controlled, capable of producing 150 bottles at a time. I built from scratch, reused, or borrowed a bunch of equipment to make this possible on a budget. I am obsessive by nature and so have exhaustively read up on both industrial and home wine making. However, as I know nothing beats experience, I'm sure I will find myself on this forum quite often asking questions as I stumble through this new hobby.

-Rubus

You have come to the right place! By the way, I am glad to see another Florida Winemaker. I spend my winters in Southwest florida and there is not a home brew or winemaking store within 3 hours drive there. Here in Pennsylvania i can be to a dozen shops in that amount of time.
Good luck on your winemaking and let us know how you are doing with it.

Welcome to the forum. Hope we can be of support to you and your new hobby.

Rubus, welcome aboard. We will certainly helps you with your newest hobby. I'd love to see pictures of your new set up.

Welcome to the forum, rubus.

Welcome aboard!!!

Thanks for the welcome guys. I'll get around to taking some pictures of my setup soon. Its not really that impressive as far as looks go. Just an old refrigerator I modified to store 30 gallons of wine, a bunch of containers and buckets, the regular wine making instruments, some equipment I borrowed from my lab, and a washing machine I converted into centrifuge while I'm building a much better one in the mean time.

I know some of these things aren't needed, like a centrifuge, but it sure helps.