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I've made several vintages of Foch and Oberlin Noir. Here in central Indiana, my issue is that our season stays so hot so late (often with humidity) that the grapes reach such a Brix that they will either start to rot on the vine or the wasps take them before the TA gets down to a reasonable...

I felt I did a decent job spraying my Cayuga this year. I've had black rot issues in the past, but at the time of harvest this year evidence of black rot was there but pretty minimal. About two weeks after harvest, the Cayuga began to defoliate. The first year (green) shoots began turning...

I have a large volume of frozen ripe strawberries to clear from my freezer by way of winemaking. I have not attempted strawberry wine in 15 years. I was a neophyte at that time so I will discard my experience. What I got was thin on flavor and unpalatable. I think we diluted and used bread...

I posted a pic earlier of a rack I"m building for a new wine room filling the space underneath our staircase. As we planned the remodel (half our downstairs is involved) I reiterated two things to the contractor regarding the wine room - the entire thing needed plastic vapor barrier on the warm...

We had an incredibly wet July last year. Water flowing in a river through my Marquette, I had never seen standing water in that location in the decade we have owned the land. Much less enough to make a river. The end result was that I had black rot set in to the Marquette terribly, and other...

I looked and looked for a prior post on here with measurements to make a diamond wine rack to no avail. So I figured out my own. Math is hard and my space has very specific space restrictions, but surprisingly, it looks like it all worked out. Go Go Pythagorean Theorem…

So I've lucked out and a beer making friend is willing to buy me a new 5gal barrel to age my wine in, so that he can subsequently age beer in the wine-conditioned barrel. Yay me! I have no experience with barrels. With a new Hungarian barrel, how long should a medium-body (Marachel Foch)...

This is my first year with grapes on my Marquette. They are definitely bigger than my other reds (Foch, Oberlin Noir). Do people typically need to net Marquette to keep the birds from taking them? Netting Foch and Oberlin is a MUST, but it would be nice if I did not have to net yet another...

As a biologist, I have a penchant for running experiments whenever possible. On my 2012 vintage, I tested free run versus pressed using a single yeast (Cotes des Blancs). My determination was that the free run was superior in every way. Slightly back-sweetened, this wine won a bronze in the...

I've typically not had a big issue with bull canes, but when I pruned this spring I realized that they were a real problem in my Oberlin Noir. About 2/3 of my vines had run huge bull canes, often more than 20 feet long. Aside from the pain of untangling and cutting them out of the 2-3...

Yesterday I realized that the shorter (less than foot tall) Marquette I planted last year had a lot of nasty looking blackish and dying leaves. The taller vines trained up on the poles seemed perfectly fine. I assumed I had screwed up and had drift onto them from glyphosate/simazine mixture I...

We had a 70-100 year winter here; 3 consecutive -15F days with high winds and then a couple more several weeks later. With the exception of my Foch, my varieties sustained significant and varied levels of damage. My couple table varieties (Candice and Ontario) had very high percentage bud...

I crushed my whites on Labor Day. I bought a cheap fridge off Craiglist to try to control the fermentation at 55-60F. The thing is touchy, I will be getting a temp controller for next year. After some back-and-forth, I had to leave town for a week and the thing ended up settling at 50F. As...

LINK I worked in plant research many years ago before I switched to medical, so I found this pretty interesting. Discovering an entire new organelle dedicated to tannin production is no small deal.

Since others have asked about similar devices before, I thought I'd take and post pics of mine while I had it out in use. My father read about this when he was a kid (1950s). In his teens, he made a very rough version and used it to make cider. Decades later, he made this more refined...

I have >10 years of experience with fruit wines...only 3 years with grape wines. The bulk of my grapes (by weight) are Cayuga White. My process has bee: - Crush grapes (the old fashioned way) - Put grapes in press; collect free run wine - Press grapes; separate pressed juice into a separate...

How about a thread to post about what you are making from this year's grapes and follow your progress? 8/24 and 8/25, I harvested my Marachel Foch (21 Brix) and Oberlin Noir (20 Brix), respectively. I soaked the Foch on the skins for 24 hours, then pressed it for a volume of 5+ gallons of...

I just got back the judging sheets on my bronze medal Cayuga White from the Indianapolis International Wine Competition. While the overall scores between the 3 judges were close, I had to chuckle at the variability in judging the individual scores. That said, two of three agreed that the wine...

I've got two peach trees bent to the ground with fruit only days from ripening. Some pies, canning, and cobblers are in order, but I imagine this will only scratch the surface and I will need to break out the winemaking gear to handle the balance of them. I've made a lot of fruit wine, but my...

My Foch have many leave which, rather than ending in the normal shape, have a tendril/hair-like look. So instead of having the smooth edges it is frilly or hair-like. If the experts here can't get it from that I can post a pic, I just didn't take one today while the light was good. There is...