Final (?) Major Equipment Purchase

In the past, I've been able to get my purchased grapes crushed and de-stemmed by the seller or we (wife always helps) have de-stemmed and crushed our grapes by hand. The small quantities that we had to process this way did not take that much time.

Well, this year we hope to have a much larger harvest from our own vines. So…. We finally bought a crusher/de-stemmer (and my son who is in the picture bought a press). Hopefully this is the last major purchase of equipment for a while.

Well.... actually I could use bigger spray equipment for the vineyard........

New addition to Winery

A very cute white/tan Cocker Spaniel puppy joined us this Christmas.

I originally wanted to call him "Wino" but my wife objected to that so I named him "Riesling". Although I'm not much of a white wine drinker, this has always been my favorite white wine.

Shortly afterwards, I was racking some carboys and emptying the sediment into a 5 gallon bucket. I always add a small amount of water to the carboy before emptying so the bucket was about half full and while I was racking another carboy I suddenly heard ... "slurp....slurp...slurp...slurp....".

Yes, that was Riesling enjoying some Italian "Wine"!! Since then he has been on patrol to clean up any and all spilled wine off the garage floor.

I should have insisted on calling him "Wino". As a compromise we gave him a "middle" name of "Wino"!