Livin’ La Vida Verjus

It hasn’t even been a week since Cousin John talked us into making verjus. (Read all about that caper here.) Already we are in the lifestyle. Yes, we’ve converted. And once you go verjus, you never go back. We made about 8 gallons — which we’ll split with Cousin John. Yesterday, a work colleague of Andy’s wondered out loud whatever were we going to do...

The Return of Cousin John’s Yeasts

Cousin John, as you’ll remember from this post, is a purist. He makes wine, but spurning our carefully crafted and specially raised UC Davis yeasts, Cousin John uses whatever is floating in the air. In fact, Cousin John only uses au natural techniques and ingredients to make wine. He’s been known to wander the byways of Sonoma picking wild fruit for fermentation....

The Last of the Wine

Harvest and primary fermentation seem to get longer every year. I’ve been wine babysitting in Sonoma since early September with hardly a break. That means living out in the wilds with two terriers, a bobcat, a newly resident coyote and a whole lot of fermenting wine. But today, we got the last of our Cabernet grapes out of primary fermentation vats (where they needed three times...

A Tale of Two Presses

Today we tackled the Cabernet press and again, we were lucky enough to have Cousin John to help us. But that also meant two different presses as we are still in the throes of an interesting experiment. Andy and I are processing our Cab with UC Davis yeasts and modern methods. Cousin John, who we “paid” in grapes for his help with the crush, is defiantly Old Skool:...

The Harvest Goes Ever On and On

Jeez, you know you’re blogging too much when you write a post, but forget to hit the “publish” button. Is it Blogging Alzheimers? I’ve only really been blogging for a year, so I must be too young to be getting that affliction. I just hope this momentary blogging lapse doesn’t get me thrown out of NaBloPoMo a mere four days in. Well, until I’m...

Crushing Cab with Cousin John

Today we faced the final and most daunting physical task of our winemaking, getting the Cabernet picked, crushed and into primary fermentation. We have four varietals, but we’ve planted more Cabernet than the other three put together. So we knew, whatever we’d gone through with the Mourvedre, Grenache and Cinsault, we’d need at least to double that for the Cabernet...