Idaho vineyard real estate... winery... grapes... winemaking... viticulture... enology...Snake River Vally ava!
Wine making in Idaho!
Snake River Valley Ava
Vineyard land for sale!
While we will be the first to admit that we are inexperienced wine makers, we are having a ball! We will also be the first to admit that we would love to help you hunt down a new location for a new Idaho vineyard winery! With a little more research and a whole lot of luck, we may even make some really good wine! If you are looking for a prime piece of viticultural land feel free to give us a call! The Snake River Valley ava is huge and there is always property available that would work great for your new Snake River Valley Idaho vineyard and winery.The Ava runs from near Twin Falls all the way down river into the canyon below Farewell Bend. That is a big chunk of country. If you are looking for some rocky knob to create your dream, give us a call 1-888-722-6453!
The Cabernet Savignon grapes pictured above are our first stab at wine from "scratch". We bought a home wine making kit for Christmas last year and experimented with that and several other types of concentrates. They put the must in a vacuum and it will boil at like 100 degrees. Those were fun but from here on out it is the real thing. While we had some ok success with the concentrates it is quite a bit more difficult getting the acid and ph levels set so that the quality is acceptable. With the grapes, in a perfect world, it kind of makes itself and you become a bit of a materials handler with a set of parameters that you must stay within if you hope to have something worth the time and effort.
We arranged with a local vineyard to buy a ton of grapes. We pick them up in the last few days of October and raced home to crush as fast as possible. With the rudimentary equipment that we had it took about 8 hours to crush the 1 ton of grapes and turn it into must. Tired and sticky, we shower and did the post crush crash!
I wanted to do the primary fermentation in the barrel but did not want to take the risk of not being able to get them put back together, so we used plastic food grade 55 gallon containers. The day after the crush we pitched the yeast in and were on our way from grape juice to wine! With in a couple of days we were bubbling away! Twice a day we punched down the cap of grapes that float to the surface. Once the cap stops rising it is time to press the grapes.
The press I rented locally was pretty dirty and I could not bear to put my precious baby through it without stripping it down. So we decided to forgo quantity for quality and just did free run. Free run is just the juice that is free of the skins and when strain with a large strainer naturally "runs out". We did do a little manual pressing, but still probably lost 15-20% of the wine to the skins. We ended up with about 110 gallons that was racked into 27 gallon Hungarian oak barrels. Having never done this before, we tasted it but were unsure if it was going to be any good or not. It was real puckery. Kind of like drinking a sweet tart. It has finally started to mellow out and in the last few weeks is showing signs that maybe it is better to be lucky than good.
What's next? Not sure. Because of the small barrel size and the fact they are new barrels, I am not sure how long I will be able to leave the wine on the oak. I have read or been told a year should be ok but have also seen in writing 6 months. My storage facility is just a tiny spot under the stairs that we squeezed 4 barrels in, so I do not have room for anymore in the climate controlled area. I was thinking about getting a neutral barrel and putting this wine in that just before the next crush. At that point I think I could leave it in my garage over the winter and do a natural cold stabilization of sorts(process normally used on whites to remove bitartrate crystals). Then bottle next spring as the temperatures start to rise. If anyone with more knowledge than me would like to offer up any advise or confirm I am on the right track please feel free to contact me.
Eat,drink and be merry, but mostly give us a call if we can help you hunt down Snake River Valley ava real estate!
Labels: Idaho wine vineyard grapes viticulture winery for sale
posted by Mike Carr at
7:13 AM
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