Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in maintenance & cleaning on Nov 25th, 2008
Vote For Washington Winemaker! Grapeseek is a directory of grape and wine related links, and they are having a vote for their top ten. I would love it if you voted for Washington Winemaker. Click here to cast your vote. I don’t remember when I bought my Portuguese floor corker, or even what it was [...]
Posted in commercial wine, maintenance & cleaning, storage and aging on Sep 23rd, 2008
My dad has been keeping this big old bottle of wine that none of us knows much about. According to the label it’s a 1978 red table wine from Piedmont, Italy. It also says, “Ribezzo Barbera D’Asti.” It’s a 12-liter bottle, and I was afraid the wine was past its prime. If so, it wasn’t [...]
Posted in maintenance & cleaning on Jan 14th, 2008
Method #1: Soak and scrape I know I’m not the only home winemaker who cleans and reuses commercial wine bottles, but the labels on these bottles are getting more stubborn every year. I like to use the “soak and scrape” method. The first step, immersing the bottles in water and Oxiclean, is part of my [...]
Posted in maintenance & cleaning on Jan 4th, 2008
A few months ago, I described an easy way to clean a large fermenter, and concluded that, “It takes very little time and effort on your part, leaving you free to make more wine!” I wasn’t wrong about that, but there is a little snag lurking in that happy and optimistic statement: you have to [...]
Posted in enology, equipment, maintenance & cleaning on Nov 14th, 2007
I racked and measured four batches the other day, and it gave me the opportunity to size up my new buffer solution. I recorded TA values for three of those batches while I was still using my old buffer solution to calibrate my pH meter, and they shouldn’t have changed much. Here are the data: [...]
Posted in enology, equipment, maintenance & cleaning on Nov 7th, 2007
What is a buffer solution? You need to calibrate your pH meter for it to work properly, but to do that, you need to immerse it in a solution of known pH. Buffer solutions are the way out of that little chicken and egg problem. These are made of precisely measured ingredients that combine to [...]
Posted in equipment, maintenance & cleaning on Oct 26th, 2007
What I hate about winemaking Once I pressed the Merlot, it was time to watch airlocks bubble as the wine fermented out and then slowly cleared. It was also time to clean the fermenter. This is on the list, along with washing bottles, of my least favorite things about making wine. The best way to [...]
Posted in enology, equipment, maintenance & cleaning on Jul 12th, 2007
To work properly, a pH meter must be calibrated. You do this by preparing (or buying) buffered solutions of known pH and testing the meter against them. My meter uses a two point calibration. It works by immersing the meter in the first buffer solution (pH 6.86 in this case) then reading the pH and [...]
Posted in maintenance & cleaning on Jun 2nd, 2007
In an episode of MASH, Winchester complains that he’s the only one making an effort to keep the tent, that he shares with Hawkeye and Trapper-or-BJ (it’s been long enough that I get those two confused), tidy. The other two make messes, and he cleans them up. “It may not be a good system,” admits [...]