Roll your own wine!
Making your own wine isn't nearly as hard or mysterious as you might think.
If you start with good quality fruit, pay attention to basic things like temperature
control, oxygen exposure and elementary sanitation, and have some patience, you're almost
guaranteed to make drinkable wine, and maybe even pretty darn good wine. Here are some
resources that have come in very handy for us here at sub cellars:
Grapes and Stuff
Oak Barrel Winecraft is the Bay Area's oldest and most comprehensive source for grapes,
supplies, equipment and free advice. Tell Homer I sent you . . . and you’ll get the same
treatment as anybody else.
www.oakbarrel.com
Peter Brehm has been supplying premium grapes to winemakers across the continent for years and years, and has great fruit sources in California, Washington and Oregon for just about anything. If you wake up in a mood to make, say, a Cabernet Franc in the middle of March, he’s got the stuff you need, frozen.
www.brehmvineyards.com
More Wine! gets a little excited about itself (note the name), but does have among other things a nifty selection of yeast strains in home-size doses.
www.morewinemaking.com
Information
WineMaker is the leading national publication, bi-monthly, easy to follow, technically very sound, and they even print my stuff.
www.winemakermag.com
The Viticulture and Enology department at UC Davis concentrates, of course, on training the pros, but the information on their websites and in the extension classes can be extremely valuable for the serious amateur.
Department: wineserver.ucdavis.edu
Classes: extension.ucdavis.edu/unit/winemaking
The British Columbia Amateur Winemakers Association site has lots of useful info:
www.bcawa.ca
The Sacramento Home Winemakers site has good basic wine chemistry write-ups, a listing of grapes for sale, and other stuff,
at www.sachomewine.org
And if you'd like to know what Blind Muscat REALLY thinks, check out his Cellarbook.
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