Grape growing & home winemaking
Grow your own grapes,
then make the wine
Free, genuinely useful tools and research-based guides for every backyard grower, from choosing your first vine to bottling your first vintage.
5 free tools
Variety finder, ripeness, Brix, pruning calendar and a vineyard planner.
Results to your inbox
Every tool can email you your own personalized result and cheat-sheet.
Research-based guides
Step-by-step articles, backed by university-extension research.
Vine to bottle
From choosing a variety all the way through to making your own wine.
Free grape-growing tools
Tools that answer what guides leave out
Built to settle the real questions, sized to your zone and your plot, and the calculators can email you your personalized result.
Grape Variety Finder
Tell it your USDA zone and what you want to grow. It filters 40+ varieties to the ones that will actually survive and ripen for you, with where to buy them.
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Will My Grapes Ripen?
Estimate your season’s heat in growing degree days and see which varieties have time to ripen before frost. The question short-season growers ask most.
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Brix to Potential Alcohol
Turn a refractometer reading into potential alcohol, convert across every must-weight scale, check harvest readiness by wine style, and size up a sugar addition.
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Vineyard Year & Pruning Calendar
Your zone, vine type and trellis become a month-by-month task list: when to prune, watch for frost, thin, net, harvest and protect vines for winter.
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Backyard Vineyard Planner
Lay out a plot and get vine count, trellis materials, a rough cost and an estimated harvest in bottles. In feet or metres, dollars or euros.
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Grape Growing Toolkit
A short, honest kit of well-reviewed tools for growing grapes and making wine, with where to find each one.
Open the tool →Start here
The core grape-growing guides
New to grapes? These walk you through the whole journey, from bare ground to your own harvest.
How we work
Built on research you can check
Every guide is put together by the GrapeGrowingGuide editors from university extension services, grape breeders and growers’ associations, with the sources linked so you can dig deeper. We’re editors, not a commercial vineyard, so we show our work instead of asking you to take our word for it.
How we research →Don’t plant the wrong grape
Vines take years to fruit, so the variety you pick matters. Get the free cheat-sheet of grapes that actually survive and ripen in your zone, and plant the right one the first time.
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