Buying Grapes For Home Winemaking !!LINK!!

To make great wine you have to start with great grapes and fresh juice. PIWC has been dedicated to selling the highest quality grapes and juices to home winemakers and commercial wineries since 1964. Our fresh local grapes & juices are the same ones we use in our commercial winery operation to produce our popular and award winning wines. We purchase only from the best local and regional growers and hold our growers to exacting quality standards. Our staff is actively involved in the grower community to maintain the highest quality standards in viticulture and grape handling and processing. We believe in establishing strong relationships with our growers and insist on a commitment to quality practices from all growers with whom we do business. We stand by our growers who maintain that commitment and move on from those who don't. This approach provides a consistent supply of quality fruit for our customers and for us and a consistent and reliable market for our growers. We also provide our customers with grapes and juice products from Italy, Chile, Spain, Australia, California and the West Coast, and regionally.

buying grapes for home winemaking

Varieties: PIWC has been selling high quality grapes and juices to home winemakers and commercial wineries since 1964. We were one of the first, if not the first, in our region to do so. With the exception of those from the West Coast, these grapes & juices are the same ones we use in our commercial winery operation to produce our popular and award winning wines. We offer a wide variety of Red and White, Native Labrusca, French Hybrid, Vinifera, Italian, and California grapes and juices.

With wine concentrates there is also a larger variety available to the home winemaker than if they were to try to purchase or grow their own grapes. Currently, we offer over 200 different wine juices from all over the world: France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Chile, Argentina, Canada and California. An incredible selection that allows one to make a medley of wines that never gets tiring, and unlike grapes, these wine concentrates are available throughout the year.

But for the more aggressive home winemakers, making wine from grapes may be the only way that brings satisfaction to the hobby for them. For some there is something about the hands-on feeling you get when you crank down on a grape press that makes the process worth doing. If this is you then by all mean go for it. Making wine from fresh grapes is certainly rewarding, and once mastered, will allow you to produce wines that go well beyond some of the best wines you will find on the market today.

Double A Vineyards now carries wine juices and supplies for wine making. Waiting a few years for your grapes to mature enough for a full crop load can feel like a lifetime. Now you don't have to wait! Try a new variety before you plant it or test a variety while your plants mature! We have an extensive list of hybrid, vinifera, and American varieties, both reds and whites as well as fruit juices for winemaking.

Nobody is exactly sure how many home winemakers there are, but some estimates put the number at one million in the United States and Canada. While many home winemakers are clustered in places like California, where it is possible to acquire fresh grapes, others make wine by buying frozen grapes and having them shipped or purchasing kits that have a grape juice concentrate that just needs re-hydrating and fermentation.

Berkeley has long been a center of home wine making, in large part because of the presence of Oak Barrel Winecraft on San Pablo Avenue, one of about 200 home brewing stores in the U.S. The company, founded in 1957 as Oak Barrel Winery, originally focused on making its own wine. Selling winemaking equipment from Italy was almost a side business, according to Homer Smith, who has worked there since 1969. At that time, the clientele was mostly Italian and Portuguese families with a long tradition of making their own wine.

Now the local food movement has prompted another uptick in the number of people making wine at home. When Bernie Rooney and his wife bought Oak Barrel in 1992, the store sold about six to seven tons of fresh grapes to local home winemakers a year, he said. This year, more than 300 customers purchased 90 tons of 16 different types of grapes, including cabernet grapes from Napa, Syrah grapes from Amador County, and sauvignon blanc grapes from Contra Costa County.

Patterson, however, prefers to crush his own grapes in small batches. He and his friend Chris Bacon loaded four vats of whole grape clusters into the trunk of a car and drove off to his home on Derby Street.

Every year since 2013, Ernst and her husband Greg have picked grapes from the 250 vines in front of their home, de-stemmed and crushed them in rented equipment in their garage, and then poured them into plastic bins to start fermenting, the first step in becoming wine.

Because home winemakers are working with such small quantities, they usually buy grapes from friends or local growers looking to offload surplus. One great spot to find grapes of all varieties: an online marketplace run by the Sonoma County Winegrowers. Procuring equipment is important, too. Some garage winemakers own their equipment or share with friends through winemaking clubs or word of mouth. Others turn to The Beverage People, a Santa Rosa company that sells winemaking equipment and supplies, including small-scale crushers, de-stemmers, and presses along with fermentation bins, barrels, bottlers, and more.

Gary Alvey, a retired firefighter in Healdsburg, is a home winemaker and says one of his favorite moments in the process is taking that first taste and to see how a vintage is shaping up. Over the last 15 years, Alvey and his winemaking partner Mike Sinclair have experienced serious success, taking home two double gold honors for their Sauvignon Blanc. But that recognition pales alongside the fact that his friends think the wine is delicious.

Budding hobby winemakers in Sonoma County have plenty of resources. A good first step is to reach out to a local home winemaking club for ideas and mentorship. Fall is the perfect time to get started, as most grapes are picked in September and October and are used fresh.

A mutual friend introduced us. She knew that Mary Jane, then in her mid 80s, wanted to sell some grapes from the part of the vineyard she reserved for family, from which they made beautiful wines: merlot, zinfandel, and barbera, often in field blends. It had become too much work to produce, and too much wine to drink. And there we were, home winemakers up for scavenging small amounts of delicious grapes.

We began our winemaking careers while living in California in the early 1970's. While we were both employed full-time doing scientific research at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, we began to enjoy the pleasures of visiting local wineries and learning about winemaking styles and techniques. We were given the opportunity to work at two Santa Clara County wineries, Mirassou and Ridge, on a part time basis. As our knowledge and interest grew, we joined with several friends to begin buying grapes and making wine as amateur wine-makers.

Although we hoped to eventually have our own winery, we were not quite ready. Cypress Mill was a place for us to get away from city life. We again began buying wine grapes and making wine as home winemakers.

At Wilhelm Family Vineyards, we are passionate about winemaking and are happy to talk with you more about the process. If you have any questions about how we grow our grapes or what the process of creating our local wines is like, let us know. You can visit us at our estate winery in Sonoita or our tasting room in Tucson.

Éleveur means breeder in French. A négociant-éleveur, then, means a wine merchant and developer. These are the negociants that acquire grapes or unfermented wine juice and do their winemaking effectively from scratch. They can pull any number of levers like the number of wine tannins or wine alcohol content. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most difficult and prestigious négociant.

Joseph Druin established himself as a reliable négociant at the age of 22 around Burgundy. While the family-owned Drouhin owns almost 200 acres of vineyards, they still acquire grapes from other growers to fold into their winemaking processes. Another great example of a négociant-éleveur.

Bouchard Père & Fils buys the majority of their grapes from other growers. They then take care of the rest of the winemaking process. They do own over 300 acres of vineyard, however. Again, a négociant-éleveur.

With over 15 years of home and commercial winemaking experience, Vino Superiore elevates your winemaking experience with ultra-premium Italian grapes from the most prestigious vineyards. In addition, Vino Superiore offers a full line of professional-grade Italian winemaking equipment.

Now NVV wants to use an archane aspect of labeling to diminish all other regions that choose to buy grapes and make wine where they are. The consumer should always know first and foremost where the grape came from and using the AVA system we get that done. We have no legal authority common tasting panels that certify winemaking conformity to a region, as in Europe, most likely because our American culture has been about FREE Enterprise not prescribed enterprise, protecting the established.

For the buyers and sellers of wine made by negociants in the US and the rest of the world, knowing what and who's behind the mystery label is essential. Did the negociant make the wine from raw, premium grapes, or has it established a reputation for buying critically acclaimed winemakers who can't afford to go to market? And most importantly: does it taste like it should have cost a lot more? 041b061a72