Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in commercial wine on Mar 2nd, 2009
A lot of cheap wine is overpriced, so it’s a real treat to find a $4 bottle that I want to buy more of. A friend recommended Panilonco 2008 Reserve Chardonnay/Voignier and I bought a bottle at Trader Joe’s – a great place to hunt for bargains.
I like my white wines to have a little bite, [...]
Posted in Recipes, welch's wine on Jan 19th, 2009
Can you really make wine from Welch’s grape juice?
Welch’s, or most any brand, of white grape juice is made from Niagra grapes. These aren’t considered wine grapes, and there’s a good reason for that. Still, with proper wine making technique, you can make a crisp dry white from concentrated frozen grape juice that is surprisingly [...]
Posted in winemaking on Nov 10th, 2008
There are some good reasons to make wine in 5-gallon (19 liter) or larger batches. Once you know what you’re doing, it takes about the same amount of effort to make five gallons of wine as it does to make one. The amount of headspace in a 5-gallon carboy isn’t much more than in a [...]
Six of us gathered for a great evening that began with a tasting. Not just any tasting, it concluded a three year experiment that tested the effect of boiling on making mead. Two meads went head to head that night. I made one with a ten minute boil, and the other was as identical as [...]
Posted in DIY equipment on Oct 15th, 2008
Maybe you’re trying to add just the right amount of sugar to your must, or measure out crystallized honey for mead. If you make wine or mead long enough, you’ll want to measure large quantities of liquid. I have a 2-cup (500 ml) measuring cup, but that didn’t cut it when I needed to measure [...]
Posted in tasting on Oct 8th, 2008
Greg Mankiw teaches economics at Harvard University, and I read his blog regularly. He recently spotlighted part of a Boston Globe Article on the lighter side of science. He zeroed in on the work of another economist – ok, I know what you’re thinking, “as exciting as one economist talking about another sounds, what [...]
Posted in apple wine on Sep 29th, 2008
Normally I use my own apples to supplement store bought juice in my apple wine, but this year I had more fruit available so I decided to make it exclusively from my own apples. I followed the same procedure as last year.
Ingredients
12.8 lb (5.8 kg) of roxbury russet, ashmead kernel, and liberty apples
0.25 tsp tannin
0.5 [...]
Posted in commercial wine, tasting on Sep 15th, 2008
For those of you who don’t know, Costco is a chain of warehouse stores, mainly in the US and Canada, that allows you to buy in bulk from a limited selection at terrific prices. It can be a good place to buy wine, but I hadn’t seen them sell it under there own label – [...]
Posted in measurement & testing on Sep 8th, 2008
So what’s that contraption pictured above? I wrote about it back in February, and I think it’s a better way to measure titratable acidity (TA). It works by adding a measured sample of wine to sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). The baking soda reacts with acid in the sample, giving off carbon dioxide gas (CO2) in [...]
Posted in bonsai vineyard on Sep 1st, 2008
I photograph my grape vines as closeups, so the leaves and clusters are clearly visible. Here I took in the entire vine, with a devilishly handsome model to provide a sense of size and proportion The vines in my bonsai vineyard look like this except that most of them are in 5-gallon plastic [...]