(Photos courtesy of James Monahan, Finger Lakes Grape Program)   That’s right- the Presspad goes to 11.  I bet you didn’t think we could do it.  We didn’t necessarily think we could, either, but here we are for a new season.  And what seasons we’ve had lately.  It is snowing as I write this in […]

Cornell has released two new grape varieties- Aromella and Arandell.  In this episode of the Presspad we talk with grape breeder Bruce Reisch and enologist Anna Katharine Mansfield about how the grapes came to be released and named, and some of the wine choices producers might wish to make with them. Links: About the Aromella […]

Want to know a dirty secret about the wine business?  It’s mostly about keeping things clean.  Sorry about that.  Anyway, if the three most important words in real estate are “location, location, location,” then the three most important words in winemaking are probably “sanitation, sanitation, sanitation.”  This not-so-glamorous but oh-so-necessary side of the business is […]

It was a strange spring in the East: March was unseasonably warm, and then April was all-too-seasonably cold.  The result of these temperature ups and downs was frost damage to many fruit crops.  What is frost damage?  Is it permanent?  Is it fatal?  How did the grapes fare?  Why are temperatures that are harmless in […]

By finding this post, you are confirming our suspicion that everybody does everything electronically these days.  With the online universe being the go-to place for finding information, we in the business of providing information are trying to come up with good ways to do so.  This episode of the Presspad is a conversation with some […]

As I type this, I am looking at green grass and bright sunshine out my window in Mid-March.  We did have winter in the northeast, however, and we even had a few days where it was cold enough to make one of the most exotic and challenging delicacies ever put under cork: ice wine.  In […]

In this episode we are joined by Alice Wise of the Long Island Horticultural Research & Extension Center and Steve Hoying from the Hudson Valley Laboratory to talk about the 2011 harvest from their perspective.

From the Outside Looking In… Winemakers are constantly on guard against “cellar palate,” a condition contracted from tasting your wines and your wines only.   At a certain point you can no longer recognize strengths and weaknesses that would be immediately obvious to someone tasting the wine for the first time.  The cure for cellar […]

It was a very good year…or was it? In this edition of the Presspad pocast, we talk about the 2011 from a growing and winemaking perspective- the good, the not so good, and the weird.  Of course, now that I’ve used the word “good” three times in the title and the first sentence, I need […]

Botrytis in the vineyard and winery.