This journal like our wine is a personal journey. We hope it may later be useful to others, but its main job is to help us in learning to make our wine.
plan;
read;
order stuff; -- almost always order for the long term
work through steps; -- hard to overdo this
clean;
execute -- not much of the time here
The books we found were way too general, the best single one being From Vines to Wines (FVtW). Making Table Wine at Home (MTWaH) also provides useful background information. We did a fair bit of reading, but we could not have done this without a mentor. Very fortunately, we found an excellent one with a very similar outlook to ours who had started making wine three years earlier and who lived near us, Brian Hollins.
A basic principle we followed throughout was not to skimp on materials especially when you are learning. You want to put your energy into figuring out how to do things and how to make the very best wine; not working around compromises you made.
Going through the different steps (until we understood them) was crucial for us. For example, setting up a sleeve for the crusher the first year and crushing a small batch of grapes was very helpful in getting a feel for what we would do. Similarly, practicing how to measure things like TA ahead allowed us (mostly) just to execute on pick day.
1996: We were obsessed with preventing oxidation, especially since it turned out that the wine needed more oxidation.