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2023 Cabernet Sauvignon, Santa Cruz mountains, 12.5% ABV Primary went great Secondary went great Sealed up the VCT and took off for vacation over Xmas. Returned to find VCT gasket failure. Probably 7 days exposed around the edge of the lid in a 220L Speidel in my cellar at about 60F. A few...

Carbenet Sauvignon from Santa Cruz, 12.5% alcohol, dry and lighter bodied for the type (colder year). I made a mistake and used someone else's numbers for total acid (same crush and grapes). They were off from my portion of the batch by about 1g/L. It was foolish because there are always...

I just completed alcohol fermentation on some Cabernet Sauvignon I got from the Santa Cruz mountains. A very cool year for California with a nice October harvest. It clocked in at 12.5% potential alcohol and a TA of 6.3 g/L which I bumped to 7 g/L. Alcohol fermentation took about 6-7 days and...

cabernet sauvignon grapes, stirred the must and collected a uniform volume. Took one portion through a coffee filter to remove fine solids. Measuring a specific gravity of about 1.096 in the unfiltered must. Brix is 20 for filtered must and 21 for unfiltered. In both cases pretty different...

I have about 60L of zinfandel wine. I want to oak the base wine and make about 20L of port. My plan is to oak 20L of wine. Age the 20L until I like the taste by mixing 50/50 with unoaked. Then to combine the 20L oaked wine with another 20Lunoaked to achieve what my tasting panel was set to (40L...

I have about 200L of wine finishing up in a 300L marchisio tank. I don’t want to press, just want free run juice. But how to separate from skins and transfer the wine without a press? Has anyone done this before? I was looking at a perforated suction tube, but that is quite expensive. Also, not...

I can’t seem to get my wine past dropping only 1 brix every few days. I’m stuck at Brix 13 on day 16 which is a lot of sugar content still. At day 14, I tried a restart protocol with EC-1118 yeast and a starter volume but this has also failed to get going despite all the yeast hydration...