Recent content by ovjock

This reminds me. When you bring a scale to weight your grapes, you MUST use one with a extended screen. If you don't, a 33 gallon brute will completely cover up the scale and you can't read the weight. Standing in the middle of a vineyard and realizing your mistake sucks. Don't ask me how I know...

Bumping this to the top. As a reminder, @mainshipfred will order super high quality Hungarian oak barrels for a very reasonable price if we get 10 barrels or more. Hungarian oak is much cheaper than french but many people think it is higher quality. He is doing this as a service to the...

Beautiful work!

I will raise a glass 🍷to you and your family!

Absolutely. We all would love to learn from experience before we make the big mistakes!

I used @wood1954 method for assembling an oak barrel and it works perfectly. Take scrap plywood, mark a hole around the largest hoop, cut with jigsaw and screw four temporary supports. Voila! Very helpful for a solo project.

I like this idea because it appears to solve one of my purging concerns. If we just use a CO2 bottle or similar, we are only purging while the valve is open and being purged. After we are done, the diffused oxygen still remains, though small. Dry ice, on the other hand, may take hours to sublime...

Welcome!

I didn't want to shell out the shekels for a stainless punchdown tool so I decided to use what I had. I took some 3/4" PVC pipe and a cutting board and came up with the following. I took a cutting board, put it on the table saw, drilled a hole in the center and rounded the edges off by...

Did you filter out those that said "no" to "Willing to sell to home winemakers?"

Also, I have a grower in Sonoma who let us pick a couple of years ago. We won a Silver medal with those grapes in the OC county fair competition. PM me if you want more info.

Thanks for setting this up! Sounds intriguing. I have a couple of questions. Would we pick ourselves or just get the grapes? Would people be interested in renting a destemmer/crusher so we leave with must instead of grapes (takes up a lot less space in the truck that way). Who decides when the...

It's early 2024 but in Plymouth/Amador county, it is shaping to be like 2023. If you track growing degree days (which I do), we are already colder and wetter than 2023. And 2023 was shockingly cold and wet in CA. The following is the cumulative GDD of 2023 and 2024 compared to 2022. The blue...

I want to protect my barrel until the fall so it looks like the best way for me is to use sulfur discs. However, I am getting conflicting information (shocking, I know) on how dry the barrel should be before using a sulfur disc. I have read that the barrel needs to be "bone dry" all the way to...