Making Qvevri Wine: Putting Grapes into the Qvevri

Getting a bucket of grapes and juice from a large capacity qvevri

During the morning we helped to harvest Rkatsiteli grapes. By mid-afternoon, the load of grapes arrived at the winery. The protocol at Twins Wine Cellars at Napareuli was to destem the grapes. The stems would be discarded and the destemmed grapes and […]

Making Qvevri Wine: Cleaning the Qvevri

At home, I am very concerned about making wine in carboys and small plastic fermenters that are clean and sanitized. Sometimes it takes a brush to remove crud. If you just sanitize, you end up with sanitized crud in your fermentation vessel. So I was naturally interested in how to prepare a qvevri for receiving […]

Barrel Tasting of 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon

Kathy and I went to Tin Lizzie Wineworks to taste our 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon. It has been in the Taransaud barrel for ten months and we wanted to check on how the wine is at this point. The first note was its color. The wine was a very dark ruby to black color. The opaque […]

Vessels for Winemaking

Bottom of qvevri used at Castle Hill Cider in Keswick, Virginia

Take a tour of most wineries in the United States and you will notice most have stainless steel tanks and oak barrels. Some will ferment in these as well as age wine in these vessels. Plastic bins are also popular for fermenting small […]

First Zero Carbon Footprint Closure

Image provided by Nomacorc.

What do you do with all those wine bottle closures? We don’t throw them in the trash because they are not biodegradable. So they fill up a box, then another box until we make something out of them. I’ve made wine bottle trivets, push pin boards and even cut the […]

Atlas Peak AVA – 2012 Cab Sav Wow!

Vintners crafting a 2012 wine at Tin Lizzie Wineworks in Howard County, Maryland spent Saturday and Sunday racking their wine from one barrel to another. I decided to check the progress of my Atlas Peak AVA Cabernet Sauvignon. Prior to putting the wine in a Taransaud barrel last November, the wine exhibited a bit of […]

Discovering an Aging Wine

Wine that can age continues to surprise. Last night we had dinner with family at The Hill in Grosse Point. My brother likes this restaurant in part because he can bring his own wine to the restaurant. While in his cellar I spied a bottle of the 2009 Illuminatus Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot that Kathy and I […]

2012 Winemaking Resolutions – How Well did I Do?

I had four winemaking resolutions for 2012. They were:

1. Use the filter Kathy gave me for a Christmas present. 2. Make a raspberry melomel. 3. Monitor the weather in California and determine if I should make another barrel of Cabernet Sauvignon. 4. Make another very high end kit white wine.

Ouch! only two of […]

First Book Signing Event

Our book, A Wine Journey was published last month. Our first book signing event takes place on Saturday, December 15th at Pearmund Cellars in Broad Run, Virginia from 2:00 – 5:00. We are looking forward to our visit and book signing at Pearmund Cellars. A Wine Journey has four chapters about our journey making wine, […]

Racking Off the Gross Lees

Some do. Some don’t. We did. A week after pressing our Cabernet Sauvignon, we racked the wine off the gross lees (dead yeast cells). We actually racked into a stainless steel tank. Then Terry rolled the barrel to a barrel stand that has wheels on it. Kathy and Terry turned the barrel with the bung […]