From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine
Jeff Cox
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1580171052
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From breaking ground to savoring the finished product, Jeff Cox's From Vines to Wines is the most complete and up-to-date guide to growing flawless grapes and making extraordinary wine.
Wine connoisseurs, gardeners, and home winemakers will find the latest techniques in this fully revised and updated edition. With thorough, illustrated instructions, you'll learn how to:
-- Choose and prepare a vineyard site
-- Construct sturdy and effective trellising systems
-- Plant, prune, and harvest the perfect grapes for your climate
-- Press, ferment, age and bottle your own wine
-- Judge wine for clarity, color, aroma, body, and taste
tends to go weakly into those mild winters, not really prepared for the odd night when temperatures get down to 10° or 15°F (-12° or -9°C). Buds swell during warm winter days, then freeze at night. Vinifera pumps sap early, and late freezes can split canes and trunks. Pests, mildews, molds, rots, and especially Pierce’s disease (caused by a Rickettsia-like organism; it destroyed large plantings of vinifera along Alabama’s Tombigbee River in the 1820s) all attack vinifera in the south. Most wild
was a Chancellor, and the best commercial French-American hybrid wine I ever encountered was a Château Esperanza (Finger Lakes) Chancellor. I also knew that while Chancellor could have some mildew problems, it grows well in Berks County, isn’t prone to winter kill, has no undue problems with pests, and gave me a good gut feeling. A variety of vinifera with all those advantages for eastern Pennsylvania did not exist. Identify ing Wine-Grow ing Areas 15 OFFICIAL American Viticultural Areas The
Good California grape soils are flecked with flint, obsidian, volcanic debris. In the East, the hills of the Hudson River valley and shores of the Finger Lakes are stony and poor, without much of the rich humus that most other crops love. One reason why steep hillsides are so good for grapes is that erosion has scoured the land to its poorest, stoniest constituents. Bottomland soils are nearly always richer — often too rich. In addition low areas have cold air pockets, poorer water drainage,
Chambourcin SC Chancellor SC Chelois SC Delaware SC Golden Muscat MC Joannes-Seyve 23–416 MC Landort 244 MC Niagara LC Seibel 10868 MC Steuben MC Verdelet SC Vidal 256 SC Villard Blanc SC Villard Noir SC Chardonnay SC Pinot Noir SC Riesling SC Central Region Aurora LC Buffalo LC Cascade MC Concord LC de Chaunac MC Fredonia LC Maréchal Foch MC Ontario LC Schuyler SC Seneca MC Seyval Blanc SC Van Buren LC Ravat 51 MC Worden LC Northern Region Beta LC Swenson Red MC Edelweiss MC ME VT NY NH MA
a hot day, and you must hold the grapes for any length of time, get them out of the sun into a cool place. Don’t try to cool them by hosing them with cold water. That’ll cool them, but it will also immediately reduce the quality of the grapes by producing conditions for bad mold spores and off-flavored yeasts to multiply, and by washing away the microscopic spider nests and other goodies that contribute their je ne sais quoi to the finished wine. Have everything ready for the crush before you