I would be the first to say all of the hardware I use to test wines has only a minimal effect on making wine better. Mine were about as good when I only had a hydrometer as they are now but were made from pre-balanced juice. Maybe I just fell into a good thing though...Your senses are the best tools you have as a winemaker. The tools and testing just make it easier for me to verify what I taste or smell and what I want to do next, if anything. It's easy to make a bad wine from good materials but impossible to make a great wine from bad materials.
Viticulture questionI live near the Puget Sound. I planted a small vineyard two springs ago, going into...
Most of the testing just helps me not ruin a good thing; most wines make themselves anyway. The other thing that happened at least with me is I got a lot pickier about what I like and dislike in a wine over time. I don't know how that happened actually. I travel a lot and started noticing there were things I didn't care for in a glbutt of wine I had spent $7 for and that mine had tasted something like that at one point but I did something to change it; mine cost around $0.50 a glbutt even factoring in the equipment. Sometimes a little change makes a bigger difference than I would have expected, it's part of the art.
Joe
