Recent content by bruno31

Apparently no disease and nice flowering! Congrats!

I think this kind of calculation is made precisely to give an indication of how "early" is the region with respect to grape growing. So you should stick with the standard calculation and not try to alter the result. If there is enough water, the grape will grow under nearly any hot climate...

For red wines, on destemmed grapes and in a commercial setting, we usually count -30%/-40% on the water volume equivalent to the weight of the grapes... So 100lbs would be around 12 gallons of water, which would lead to about 7-8.5 gallons of wine... However if you don't press much, if...

Ok, I didn't catch that... Here in France, oak spirals are considered a total heresy (even if many have cheated with this in the past, even among prestigious Bordeaux domains!) If you like the taste, why not, but then go with the lighter one (i.e French oak). Problem is, oak spirals won't...

It's always nice to test different things, so go on with the 3 differents oaks! This will give you more experience about the effects of each type of oak. Are your barrels new? If so, be careful not to "mark" the wine too much...

I think the best is simply to taste every day and see when you want to press. Extraction depends on so many factors that there is no hard rule... If there is still sugar, you should of course be careful with the fact that tannins will be less perceptible... When you like the tannin content...

Hi mojo, Not destemming is a perfectly possible option. As usual, this will depend on the quality and maturity of your grapes: the more mature your grapes, the better will be your tannins. As a matter of fact, systematic destemming is quite recent in the history of viniculture. Until the...

Sorbate should be used only on sweet wines. For red dry wines, sorbate is useless, and can even be detrimental if you have some bacterial development (sorbate only inhibits yeast, not bacteria), leading to bad flavors. It is even more risky in your case if you don't do the malolactic...

Thanks Joe, happy to be here ;)

It is true that colour extraction is maximum after around a week, but colour won't decrease so much after that period, unless your grapes have a low anthocyanin content to begin with. What I can say from my past experience as a professional winemaker (in the south of France, under...