Recent content by wfournier

I'm not as familiar with vinifera but it sounds like you may have a VSP trellis which would be typical for vinifera. Here is a sheets from double A that goes over some of the basics, there is tons of information on youtube and I'm sure there are others here who may be better equipped to help...

What type of grapes? Vinifera or something else (not sure what is common in the UK). Have you built a trellis for it? I would look into training systems and based on the variety of grape you have folks should be able to make recommendations.

Thanks for the update, looking back at the pictures you posted before it looks like you have support wires running the length of the row but not across. Is that correct? You had mentioned that the smaller mesh in the original netting resulted in fewer birds getting caught, is that still the case...

I know this is an old thread but I am curious if you have any further updates on this? I've been considering doing something similar in my backyard style vineyard (64 vines in a roughly 20X110 ft area). Any changes to your support system? How has it held up? The smaller size makes overhead...

Thanks, I'll avoid the temptation to mess with it :D

Thanks my thought on that was to see how the profile changed as the acid went down to see if it had an effect that might make the alcohol level less objectionable. I'll have to look at the options for reducing the alcohol, I think I had read that generally the approach is to add some water but...

I have a 3 gallon batch of wine made from Itasca grapes that we grew and after racking I found that they ended up fermenting down to .992 from a starting sg of 1.102. This gives me about 14.4% alcohol. It definitely seems a bit on the strong side and I'm wondering if I should try to adjust this...

Is damage spreading or limited to the grapes that were initially damaged? Birds wasps and hornets will damage grapes, in my experience honey bees (what I see in your pictures) go after grapes that are already damaged. Not an expert but to me the damaged fruit looks like bird damage (at least...

Yeah those numbers look good, the SG might be a touch low but with the PH at 3.5 I'd think they are ripe (I'm in the first year of picking marquette as well so not an expert). I'm surprised they were not darker, this is what our looked like with a SG of 1.094 and a PH of 3.00 (I probably should...

My guess is it will get more red, I think you may have done a more thorough job of crushing them than is necessary. I'm not an expert but I think the main goal is to break the skins so the juice can be released. Everything loosens up during fermentation and comes free on it's own that way. As...

Wow those are some pulverized grapes, how were they crushed? The juice from our marquette was a pink/red color right after crushing and darkened significantly while fermenting on the skins.

I'm curious what netting you used, I think we may be looking for something a little different next year as a couple birds did get stuck in our netting and that is something we would like to try to avoid in the future.

I tend to agree, but the La Crescent needed to be picked grapes were starting to deteriorate, not sure if it was insects or fungus (probably both) but they would not have lasted another week. I was surprised at the brix on them because my last sampling was 23.5, I must not have gotten as...

The bounty

We picked our first grapes this year from vines we planted three years ago. We didn't get as much as I had hoped for but enough to start playing with, learned a lot for next year. Numbers on some were better than others, I'm guessing some of the high acid is due to the vines being young and...