Growing Your Own Wine to Fill Your Home Wine Cellar
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Many people with home wine cellars enjoy wine, and depend on wine-producing companies to provide them with it. This is an excellent way to try a variety of kinds, makes and recipes. However, wine is not free! The higher the quality, the higher the price as well.
Growing your own organic wine at home is virtually free, and is an option for money-conscious wine connoisseurs. Maybe you have plenty of money but want to try your hand at the craft for fun. Either way, you’ll need some pointers to start filling your wine cellar with wines of you very own.
First off, depending on where you live, grape vine growing will be more of less difficult. If you live somewhere far North, with harsh winters, you probably won’t have much luck. Grapes vines die in perpetual cold, and require mild winters. You could try growing them in a greenhouse, but you’d need to filter it with air to keep it from becoming too humid. Grapes flourish in medium-hot, dry conditions.
If you’re fortunate enough to live somewhere with a temperate climate, long, dry summers and mild winters, you can plant you grape vines right outside your house. Just be sure to find a well-drained area to plant them, because if grape vine roots soak in water, the plant will die or the grapes will be sickly and low quality -which would transfer into the wine made from them.
Once you’ve found a place to plant them, there are several factors you should know and take into account. They are as follows:
- The ripening season of where you live -find the average length.
- The typical annual weather conditions.
- The kind of soil they’ll be in, and the chemistry of it.
- The fertility of where you will planting.
- The topography.
- How much sun they will get -sun exposure.
- Possible pest problems to take precautions against.
Pick Your Grape Vine Species Carefully to Achieve High Wine Quality
If you want your grape vines to flourish, plant them In clay, limestone, rock, gravel, slate… any soil, really. The most important thing to ensure is that the soil drains well. You want the roots to be able to reach water, but not for them to be soaked In it constantly.
When trying to decide which sort of wine grapes to plant, think about how high of quality you’re going for. Obviously you’d want the best possible, but the higher the quality, the more tending that will be required to ensure that quality translates into the wine.
The cultivated species Vinifera is known to produce the finest wines. However, Vitis can also produce wines, the species is just known to have many wild subspecies that could produce considerably lower quality wine. Just be sure to know the exact kind you’re purchasing.
Some final tips include:
- Proper spacing, so that the vines have space to grow to full maturity and don’t hinder each other’s progress.
- Keep your eye out for these pests in particular: moth grubs, red spiders, various mites and beetles. Some pesticides effective against grape vine pests are sulfur sprays, or, if you are one to opt for more green methods, introducing predacious insects and protective cover crops between the vine rows is also a viable option.
- Prune your vines. Do this in the winter, and prune all of the branches close to the mother vine, to promote even distribution of fruit during harvest.
Once you’ve planted, care for them and wait. It’s alright if you don’t do perfectly your first try -you may miss a pest, or the soil may not drain as well as you’d hoped. You can just use your mistakes to improve next year.
Have a Home Wine Cellar Installed With Wine Cellar Refrigeration Units For Your Wines
In the meantime, be sure to have a wine cellar with a proper Redondo Beach California wine cooling system installed to store your wines in when they’re finished. In your wine cellar, your wines can age safely, given that you’ve looked through wine cellar refrigeration units and have purchased one for your cellar. To ensure that the wine cooling system does its job well, have proper wine cellar doors installed.
If, for whatever reason, your wine cellar has a unique shape, you may want to look into custom wine cellar doors. Custom wine cellar doors Los Angeles California, as their name implies, can be made to suit your particular needs. You can also have custom carvings put onto them, or really anything else you want.
Santa Ana California wine cellar construction should be complete in time for you to store your own, homemade wines in your home wine cellar. A proud day, and a real pay off from all the work and care you put into your grape vines.