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As many of you know, I work at the Willsboro Cold Hardy Grape Trial Vineyard. I do the daily work needing to be done to maintain the vineyard and such. This week was our first main picking for 2009. We ended up picking 12 varieties and got a couple tons of grapes or so.
This year we will again be sending 10 varieties of grapes to the wine lab in Geneva at Cornell. They will be using standardized methods and set yeasts to compare grapes varieties for wine. We had the 10 done last year and most folks were less than impressed with the generic lab wines. We want to send them again this year, but requested a wine more typical of a commercial wine. We were told that they don't do that type of wine
, they only have lab type facilities.
That's when my foot got shoved in my mouth as I agree to a request to make matching wines of the grapes we send out there. By that I mean, they get half the grapes and I get half the grapes, to each make our version of wine. I'm expected to make the commercial type wines- 10 in all. I know I can do it, I already have from all the varieties, but.........
I am up against some pretty heavy hitters here, including the head folks at the Enology Department of Cornell - including Anna Katharine Mansfield - formerly of the University of Minnesota where many of them were developed.
This should be fun, but makes my life even more hectic. We decided to do this yesterday afternoon so I arrived home with half of them today or about 600 hundred pounds. Stay tuned!
This year we will again be sending 10 varieties of grapes to the wine lab in Geneva at Cornell. They will be using standardized methods and set yeasts to compare grapes varieties for wine. We had the 10 done last year and most folks were less than impressed with the generic lab wines. We want to send them again this year, but requested a wine more typical of a commercial wine. We were told that they don't do that type of wine
That's when my foot got shoved in my mouth as I agree to a request to make matching wines of the grapes we send out there. By that I mean, they get half the grapes and I get half the grapes, to each make our version of wine. I'm expected to make the commercial type wines- 10 in all. I know I can do it, I already have from all the varieties, but.........
I am up against some pretty heavy hitters here, including the head folks at the Enology Department of Cornell - including Anna Katharine Mansfield - formerly of the University of Minnesota where many of them were developed.
This should be fun, but makes my life even more hectic. We decided to do this yesterday afternoon so I arrived home with half of them today or about 600 hundred pounds. Stay tuned!