For those who do not know me, I am the Assistant Dean of the Optometry School at Berkeley. I have been a professor at Berkeley since 1978. I retired from private practice five years ago.

Some of my other board experience includes serving as President of the California State Board of Optometry on five occasions and serving two years as President of the California Optometric Association.

Dear growers and wine makers,
Libation time, we have many stories to share with each other about this growing season, local events and local happenings. Enjoy an Art show by Timothy Lynn with his tiger painting. We also have a special guest who will be joining us at the BARN, Vlatka Bathgka, Vlatka, received her Master of Sommelier certificate at Greystone Culinary Institute in Saint Helena. She lives in Orinda. Please come out to the Barn, bring your best wine to share with other growers and some Appetizers.

Hello Group, I was short 400' of catch wire when installing my vineyard, does anybody have, or know a close by source for catch wire by the foot or 100s of feet? I don't want to have to buy a whole 100# roll again! thanks for any help, Scott 925-875-1313. swilder@ableserve.com

When talking to some of the other members, it seems that there are some common issues being faced by the growers such as: raisining/bunching of some of their crop, raccoons, birds, disappearing fruit on rows. If you are experiencing similar or other issues and/or have suggestions on how to deal with these problems/pests, please post a comment to this entry and share your experiences and suggestions. We can hopefully get a good dialog going here and help each other in this critical time.

With the crush starting in a little over a month, I thought I would post a checklist I made up last year to help prepare for winemaking. If anyone has any additions or corrections, let me know. Who knows, maybe in the future I will dress it up so it is more readable. In the meantime I hope it wil be helpful.

Bill

Sorry for sending again, but the attachemnts didnt go the first two times ---

We had a good session today on lab work you can do at home. I handed out a list of references to get instructions and other info on the procedures and equipment we discussed. By popular demand I added the link to an online calculator to determine how much metabisulfite powder or standard 10% solution to add to get the desired molecular SO2. The updated reference list is attached. The links work in Word, so no need to retype them.

Bill

The winemaking class today was a smaller group, but we had lots of good discussion and covered a lot of ground. Here is the PowerPoint presentation I used for today.

Bill English