Battle Plan

Good evening,

Getting my grape list together, and that also means getting my recipes and techniques together.

The wines I'm planning on make this year (and this is subject to change) are:
Chardonnay, Muscat, Sangiovese, Syrah and Zinfandel.

So what's my plan?

I'm still working on the details.

I want to make some cool things happen with my Chardonnay, and that means malolactic fermentation and careful selection of the yeast.

I want lots of grape flavors in my wines this year...and I want the phrase 'jammy' to apply. "Chewy" would be nice too.

I want to enter one or more of these in some contests next year and win.

So how will I go about all this? I've got basic recipes for each of these. I'm learning that winemaking is a lot like cooking: the quality and type of your ingredients matter. Fresh herbs taste better than dried herbs, tomatoes from your garden taste better than the ones from the store, and, does it matter that other companies make ketchup? With wine you can take your grapes (whose quality I don't have much control over, sadly) and control flavors with temp, yeast strain, when you chill the wine, when you rack the wine and even see huge differences from minor variations of pH!

Gotta go do my homework.

Sean