It typically takes between 4-6 days to thaw the grapes once they have shipped. Sugar levels and ph testing should be performed only AFTER the grapes have been fully thawed.

Keep in mind our vineyard is a farm with many thousands of individual vines. As the vines mature, they are each individual exposed to different soil conditions, water flows, and temperatures. As a result, you may notice slight variations in the sugar, ph, or other variables between buckets. We try our best to process the entire vineyard in the same timeframe however, given the volume of grapes, we may have to pick over the course of two weeks.

Follow our guide here:

https://www.grapesforwine.com/how-to-make-wine-with-grapes-from-home/

There are many reasons our pricing is far better than the competition and we will list just a few of them:

1. We farm many of our own grapes. For almost all of the Livermore grapes, you are buying directly from the farm, we cut out the middleman.
2. We own our own processing plants in Livermore, California to haul, crush, destem, and make the buckets.
3. We own all of our own freezing units. We do not have to factor in any rental of freezers into our costs which can add upwards of 20-30% of overhead to the supply-chain.
4. We simply have better shipping rates than the competition due to our high volume throughput of other products we distribute from our warehouses in California and Oregon.

High quality, without the unnecessary markup.

First, it is crucial to document your winemaking process to replicate or improve this future process. Many causes exist for a wine to have a hazy or poor clarity of which a majority can be cleared relatively quickly with time and sometimes with chemicals or natural additives. The most common method is racking wine, which means letting the material floating settle and siphon or drain the top portion off, leaving the materials at the bottom and more transparent wine in another tank.

Gelatin Finings: Add between ½ and one teaspoon per 5-gallon batch, dissolved in water, and added after the wine has completed primary fermentation. This additive removes yeast and some tannin from suspension through binding. It works incredibly well for red wines but less so for white wines.

Super-Kleer KC Finings: This is a dual-stage wine clarifying kit. This kit contains two premixed pouches of kieselsol and chitosan. The fining process works by creating strong negative and strong positive charges in the wine, allowing for larger yeast clumping and faster clearing. Works great in wine kits, grape and fruit wines, and alcohol mashes. 65 mL (2.2 fl oz) packet.

Directions:

1. Add kieselsol (packet D1) to carboy (5-6G/19-23L) of wine, etc.
2. Gently stir.
3. Dissolve chitosan (packet D2) in 1 fluid oz./30mL of warm water.
4. Add and stir gently.

This process clears wine in 12-48 hours but can take up to 2 weeks for the full effect. May not clear pectin haze or products made with hard water.

It is excellent for wines since chitosan is very gentle on flavors and aroma, so it is a popular option for clearing wines. 

Biofine Clear: – Clarifier that uses silicic acid (SiO2) as the primary active agent. Use this to speed up yeast sedimentation and also remove other haze forming protein particles. It is vegan. 

Add between ½ tablespoons and two tablespoons to clarify the wine and only take a couple of days to clarify fully. This clarifier must be stored cold.

Bentonite: – This is a clay mineral naturally produced from volcanic ash. Winemakers may use bentonite at the beginning of fermentation to help clarify and create a more refined fermentation to ease the clarifying process. Bentonite can be very useful in removing unstable proteins out of a must or wine to add at the beginning of fermentation or a month before bottling the wine. Bentonite binds to positively charged proteins and absorbs many times its weight in water to clump together and drop to the bottom as sediment. You must premix with water before use. 

Pectin Haze is a protein haze from the fleshy parts of grapes that is hard to clarify and clear. 

Pectic Enzyme:  An enzyme used to reduce pectin’s hazy effect (pulp matter) when using real fruit in your wines. Mix two teaspoons with cold water and add to 5 – 6 gallon of must before fermentation. Another measurement tool uses ½ teaspoon per gallon only in wine and adds to the must at the beginning to improve must clarity. This enzyme also makes pressing more efficient and aids in tannin extraction. Grapes have some pectin, and many different fruits have higher pectin levels like apples, oranges, plums, and pears. 

Each bucket contains grape must and may contain up to 4% MOG material. MOG is a material other than grapes such as stems, sticks, leaves. MOG is NORMAL and should be removed prior to fermentation.

Yes, absolutely! Please follow this link for all bulk orders and procedures. https://www.grapesforwine.com/bulk-buy/

We typically ship within 1-2 business days, however, if you are located on the East Coast and place an order on Wednesday-Friday we may not ship until the following Monday. This is because we don’t want the pails to sit in a shipping warehouse of unknown temperature over the weekend. The shipping carriers usually give an estimate and we don’t want it to take more than 5 days transit time to reach you. West Coast orders will also typically ship out within 1 business day.

Each 50-pound bucket will yield approximately 2.5-3 gallons of wine. Each bucket is hand-filled, so slight variations may be present between any two buckets. Please keep in mind these grapes are grown on a farm, each vine is different, each acre is different so there may be slight variations between the buckets due to this.