C.R.A.P. Wine Cellars (Cheap Retired Airline Pilot)
Backyard viticulturists and home winemakers attempting to grow and produce drinkable wines.
Not again! We have late season signs of powdery mildew. Mostly in our Chardonnay. Some of the fruit seems to taste OK but there are some damaged clusters and vines with damage.
While we had been spraying 3 types of fungicides on a rotational basis we may have stopped too soon.
The link to a walkthrough of the entire vineyard youtube.com/watch

Did a brix test in the field today. The Chardonnay is a disappointing 5-8º on Sept 6! The Pinot Noir is around 10-14º. Without another 2 weeks of warm weather we may be in a situation where we will have to pick and chaptilize (add sugar).
Both our wines were racked today to get it off any remaining lees and oak chips. MLF was started but we think there is a possibility that it did not take or has not stalled. Why do we think this? We are not seeing much in the way of oxygen bubbles passing through the airlocks on the carboys. Testing for MLF completion is an arduous task and we aren’t bottling so it’s not imperative that we know where it stands of the percentage of completion right now.
We did read about a new procedure today we hadn’t seen before; Purging the air from a new carboy vs filling with wine and just adding inert gas on top. It’s incredible to see how sticking a flame into the gas immediately extinguishes the flame.
We need more leaf topping and thinning especially around the fruit. Some of the clusters are touching and overcrowded and really should be removed, but it’s just so difficult to cut off a happy cluster.
It’s been 2 days since we moved our 2021 Breakthrough Pinot Noir from the fermentor into 2 carboys to settle out the gross lees (the heaviest particles the pressed juice which settle to the bottom)
We put each carboy into the same size carboy, keep the free run separate from the pressed juice. Unfortunately we ended up with more headspace in the carboys than we can safely protect from oxygen with just Argon gas.
So what to do? We didn’t want to consolidate the free run with the pressed wines so we opted to add bottled wine to our wine to bring the levels up. This is what is suggested for home winemakers.
In making our choice of what to pour in .. we decided to use 3 bottles of our own “C.R.A.P. wine we made from the Brehm Pinot Noir frozen must in 2019. That way we can still say it is 100% our wine we made!
C.R.A.P. Wine Cellars (Cheap Retired Airline Pilot) 