Dating wine

The "vintage" (lit. wine year) normally indicates the year of the harvest. Since the harvest is typically in July-November (in the Northern Hemisphere), the year of the harvest should be the same as the year of primary fermentation (unless the juice was frozen and fermented at some subsequent time). The year of bottling, typically 2-10 years later, does not usually appear on the label.

However, it is not a capital offence to vary this tradition. If you are not selling to the public, you can put whatever is meaningful to YOU on the label.

Since I make wine all year long, and may make several batches of the same sort of wine, I use the day I pitched the yeast as the "vintage". I also include the bottling date.

----------------------------------- CHÂTEAU NIKOLAYOV

Cherry Wine

Vat #2 – 14 November 2001

Mis en bouteille 8 septembre 2003 par le propriétaire, Negodki

-----------------------------------

Port wine tends to an exception to this...

Um.. Yes.

I often provide a start date and a bottling date for my fruit wines. In commercial grape wines, the year of harvest is the vintage date.

Sure.

I was talking about Late Bottled Vintage Port to be specific. LBV is aged in casks for 4-6 years and is bottled on a certain date. Since Port Makers declare certain years to be 'vintage', it's not really indicative of the quality of the wine. The bottling date is important because it shows how much time the port has spent in wood.

I don't follow the traditional method. I use kits, and I put the year of bottling on the label. I place a small code on the label that will remind me of the kit manufacturer and the month that it was bottled. That way, if it ends up being particularly good, I can buy it again. However, I have found that while most of my kit wines are good (i.e. quite drinkable and occasionally excellent by my tastes), an exceptional batch is usually not repeated by buying the same kit again.

okay, I havn't bottled any wine yet, but the way I plan to do so is this: I give each batch a number represented by the date and each bottle will be a sub set of this number. I have a spreadsheet that will let me look each bottle up and see exactly where it came from etc.

I started my first batch on September 21st 2003. the batch number is

On the bottle I plan to put the year it was started, as well as the bottle ID number. That way I will also know if the wine was some of the first out, or if it came mostly from the bottom of the barrel (so to speak)... might make a differance, might not.. doesn't hurt anything either way.

Each batch has a sheet that has dates of racking, sg, pH, what kind of wine it is, how much sugar was needed, everything I can think of, including how many bottles of what size were used, what color the bottle, and what color of plastic sleeve got used. That way I should be able to find bottles faster (if I ever get to that point)

One of the tings I do at my job is very tedious, slow, and requires no thought watsoever.. I have alot more time to plan and think about stuff like this than I do to actually make the wine..

If anyone is interested in a copy of the spreadsheet or batch template, let me know. I would be more than happy to send you one...

email: dallyn_spam at yahoo dot com please respond in this NG so others can share your wisdom as well!