updated 09/16/2023
This menu contains background, history, and notes from my wine making adventures since 1981. Here you will find pages for:
November 2018
After several months of effort, I have moved the vast majority of my old wine making site to this one! I expect I’ll be cleaning things up for months to come, but the majority of the move is complete.
August 2018
After several years of complete neglect, I decided to move my site to a content management system … which is what you’re looking at now. I’m moving my records to a post-based system, which should be easier for me to maintain.
December 2007
I found my wine and beer making notebook, along with some worksheets! At some point I boxed up some “stuff” and this got put in with the stuff. Good thing I decided to clean the attic!
In the book are most of my original records from the 1980’s, along with notes from more recent wines. I made a merlot kit in the spring of 1999 … having no memory of doing so until I found the record. Any pages whose footer indicates an update date of 31 December 2007 were updated from my notebook — including 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2002.
September 2006
Many years ago I decided I needed to preserve my wine making logs in a format other than my notebook. The notebook was (and still is) a small looseleaf notebook about 3″x6″. Since 1985 I had recorded my recipes and notes in this book, both for wine and for beer. In 1990 I typed most of my notes into Microsoft Word documents on a Macintosh.
In the succeeding years the files moved with me from computer to computer, following me through my professional career, even if I didn’t ever look at the files. [I was surprised to note that the modification date of most of the files was 1990!]
Some months ago I decided I wanted them on my web site. This is sort of a joke — the wine & beer making and Visual Basic sections of my site have been mostly in limbo since I started the site in July 1999. I had grand plans to publish all types of material, but never got around to it. Oh, I did publish some of the more recent wine making efforts, and finally completed my white paper on sweetening wine (that took me nearly 6 years to finish the last few formulas!) but I just haven’t been into it.
Until recently! I decided to get off my bippy and do it! This page represents the results of a few hours of digging through my files, pulling together a list the various types of wine I’ve made. I have:
- Complete (and incomplete) winemaking records of wines I made as much as 20+ years ago.
- Bottle labels for wines that no other record exists.
- Packages of wine kits I vaguely remember making, but only after finding the package.
- Vague memories of wines for which no evidence any longer exists.
From this I’ve pulled together a list and published it here, with all the logs to follow. While I can’t say that anyone other than me will find any value in this, it does something for me so it’s worth doing …
Some notes on the logs in this section:
Comments in the Final Notes sections for various wine logs will have a date or Afterthoughts as the left column title. Dates indicate the date the text was actually written, typically for more recent wines. Afterthoughts indicates the text was written MUCH later, probably now (September 2006). You may wonder how I could remember anything after 20 years, but it’s amazing how things popped out of the recesses of my memory when I started this project.
Also:
Note: The logs of wines I made in my early years demonstrate an excessive amount of racking. Later I learned that wines should be touched as seldom as possible. Every contact opens up the possibility of contamination that will destroy the wine. In later years, except when there was a special need, I typically racked wines 3 times and 3 times only.
This is clearly a case of do as I say, not what I did! 🙂