Wine Cellar/Scotch Cellar

Wine/Scotch Cellar

We live on the Vineyard and so does my Father. My Father has a very nice wine cellar in his house that we share. When I say we share I mean that he lets me have a shelf. I enjoy wine but my passion tends to lean towards single malt scotch. What can I say Scotland touched my soul.

My Father and I often sit out on the patio and drink a wee dram, solve the worlds problems and come up with hair brained schemes like building a cannon. Over the years we have amassed a respectable collection of single malt whiskies. My father decided that they need to have a proper place in the cellar.  

So he built a whiskey rack to store the collection. I think that it is a rather nice addition to the wine cellar. 

But there is one little problem, it is already full. So we either have to build a second rack or start drinking... 

Measuring Brix Cont.

Measuring the Sugar Continued 

It was hot last week and the hot weather is causing the sugar content to rapidly rise. It is now at 21 Brix so we are getting ready to harvest a few tons of grapes for Rose. The first Harvest will be in the next few days. We will let the rest of the grapes mature for a few more weeks then the main Harvest of Syrah will start.

Meanwhile it is coming up on the end of Deer Season, with all of this happening at the same time it is making it really hard to spend time Deer Hunting. We will see how this season goes. 

Measuring Brix

Measuring Sugar Content

As I said before we measure the sugar content in Brix. This is done with a sample of grapes taken from various rows and various places in the vineyard. The samples are collected into a clean beaker.

 After the sample is collected the grapes are crushed and mixed together. By doing this we get an average sugar content representative of what the winemaker will see when he/she takes the harvest and turns it into grape juice.

 Some of the juice is taken out of the sample and placed on the refractometer. The Refractometer is an optical device that uses the refraction of light in the juice to compute a sugar content (Brix)

 Here you can see what I see when looking through the refractometer. In this case we are averaging 18 Brix. We will do an initial harvest of grapes around 20-21Brix for Rose. Then the main harvest at 24-25 for the Syrah.

Fixing the Trailer

Preparing for Harvest

As Harvest gets closer I needed to fix our Trailer. During Harvest we use our flatbed trailed to haul the grapes to the winery. The trailer is in good shape I replaced the deck boards last year. But unfortunately the last time I used it the lights on one side did not work. 

The first thing that I did was look at the connector that plugs into the truck. I was planning on replacing this anyway because we needed an adapter to go from this older style connector to the newer style in the truck. When I pulled the connector I found this. I thought that this may be my problem. But I was to find out that it was much worse than than I thought.

After cutting back the wires to get some fresh wire I decided to tin the wires with Solder to give them a little protection and make it easier to insert them into the new connector. 

Once the wires were tinned I used a car battery to test all the connections. This is when I realized that things were worse off than I thought. Most of the lights still did not work. 

So I proceeded to install the connector before I tracked down the rest of the wiring problems. 

Once I got the new connector on I climbed under the trailer and started to chase the wires. What I found surprised me. The wires were not broken they were gone! A rat had decided to eat large chunks of the wire, copper and all. Here is a picture of three of the connections that plug into the running lights in the back before (eaten to nothing) and the new wires that I bought and started soldering in place. 

Almost all of the lights at the back of the trailer looked like this, so after several hours of rewiring I finally have the trailer ready to deliver grapes. Sorry  I did not take any pictures under the trailer, I was too busy cussing the rats! 

Vineyard Update

Veraison and Nets

The Grapes are maturing, and they have gone through Veraison, that is a fancy way of saying that they have changed color. Now the grapes are a nice dark purple color. But more importantly the sugar content is rising. Sugar content is the main indicator of when to harvest. Sugar is measured in Brix and I will start measuring the Sugar content regularly over the next few weeks. 

Now that the sugar content is starting to rise we need to net the Vineyard to protect from bird damage. You would be surprised how much damage to the crops birds can do. The nets will stay on until Harvest. Right before Harvest we will lift the nets so that the pickers can get free access to the grapes.