PVE Corker Activities

The PVE Wine Makers Club, aka the “Corkers,” have started a new wine-making project. A longtime family friend of the McCoys has a 75-acre vineyard in St. Helena and the owner, again this year, generously donated what turned out to be about 400 pounds of beautiful sauvignon blanc grapes. Last year they donated cabernet sauvignon grapes to produce a wine that has been aging and is almost ready to bottle.

For this project, four of our 15 club members drove up to St. Helena with our garden clippers in hand and picked the sauvignon blanc from well-tended vines. We took them to the owner’s home and, after a very pleasant chat and drink on a not-too-hot day, we processed them thru his grape crusher-stemmer. We transported the crushed grapes in two large tubs back to Paradise Valley Estates and put them through a press to extract the juice. The next day fermentation was started and is now complete. The grapes produced more than 30 gallons of wine that is now undergoing further processing in preparation for a future bottling party.

Most Corker projects, which are often on a much smaller scale than the new project, are made from fruit other than grapes. In addition to several batches of grape wine, so far, the Corkers have made wine from apricots, lemons, plums and grapefruit. Additional batches of fig, pomegranate and lemon wine are coming up.