Are frozen grapes as good as fresh?
Yes, we certainly think so. The route to good wine is good grapes. If we lived in California, we would make our wine from fresh grapes, just like the wineries do. But we dont live there. And so we get grapes from good vineyards and have them crushed and frozen as quickly as possible. This increases cost, but it does mean we can get good grapes in the best condition possible. Wineries like to pick their grapes in the morning and have them crushed within hours. We like this arrangement tooonly our crushed grapes go to a freezer. There are even some winemaking advantages to frozen grapes. With whites (we get settled juice) you can easily manage a little cryo-extraction while thawing if you want to raise the sugar level a bit and increase flavor intensity. With reds, the freezing and thawing process provides the ultimate cold soak. Club members have been buying Brehm Vineyard grapes for years and freezing grapes from our own crushes. We would not be going to all the trouble and expense of
