Techniques

Making a wine that benefits from long-term cellaring — be it red or white — requires high-quality grapes and a meticulous focus on the details. Explore the science and techniques required to craft an age-worthy wine.

Harvest and the heavy lifting of crushing and fermenting your 2024 vintage are in the rearview mirror at this point. That doesn’t mean the work is over. Let’s check in on your wines and review the steps every winemaker should be taking during the long winter months.

While the yeast technically does all the work, a winemaker has a lot of influence in the success of their fermentations. Understanding best practices — from rehydrating dry yeast and measured nutrient additions — as well as options like co-inoculation and using non-Saccharomyces yeasts are important tools to influence the final outcome of your wine.

Backsweetening is most often done to add sweetness to a wine, but it can also help take the edge off a harsh vintage and is used in making traditional-method sparkling wines. Learn how to backsweeten and stabilize a wine prior to bottling.

Dry ice has numerous applications for the home winemaker who needs to chill their must or juice without watering it down. Learn more about the many uses and safety precautions when dealing with carbon dioxide in its frozen form.

While taste should drive many decisions, the numbers can’t be ignored. Chik Brenneman shares the ideal statistics he looks for at harvest and what numbers outside of this range mean when the grapes enter the winery.

Sometimes we want a wine yeast that will strictly ferment a wine dry in the conditions available to it, but other instances require special purpose wine yeasts. Learn about yeast strains that serve more purposes than simply completing fermentation — be it for high-vigor, malic acid management, minimizing faults, and more.

Familiarize yourself with the critical steps and equipment required to bottle your wine.

Whole cluster fermentation — fermenting grapes without crushing and destemming them first — is a technique that has been around for ages. Let’s take a deep dive into the benefits of this technique, what the research says, and whether you may want to consider whole cluster fermentation at home.

Barrel aging typically begins after alcoholic fermentation is complete, however, you don’t have to wait until your wine is dry to start getting the benefits of oak. Learn about the advantages of fermenting in a barrel and ways it can be done at home.

Raisins can be used to add body, flavor, sugar, and complexity to grape wines. They can add a wine-like character to fruit wines. And they can even be made into wine on their own. Learn more about the use of raisins in winemaking.

Two pros share why they prefer whole cluster fermentations for certain varieties, the impact it has, and considerations home winemakers should make if they plan to forgo the crush.

Over the last decade or so, the word “terroir” has become the buzz word not just among wine lovers, but the greater agricultural world. Bob Peak walks us through several real-world examples of expressing terroir when making a red wine.

Almost all winemakers use oak barrels for aging red and some white wines, as has been the case for ages. However, if you go back far enough, other woods were once common. Even today there are some winemakers who utilize unique woods that bring different characteristics to a wine. This seems like an area ideal for adventurous home winemakers working with smaller batch sizes, less pressure from market demand, and more freedom and flexibility to experiment. To help get us started, we found two pros with experience in this realm and asked for advice.

Bleeding off a percentage of juice early during a red wine’s fermentation both concentrates the remaining juice and offers a chance to make a second wine from the bled portion. Learn when and how to employ this French winemaking technique at home.

While a stalled out fermentation can be a hassle, there are plenty of preventative measures we can take to preclude it from happening. Also, we should know the various tactics to treat it when a stuck fermentation does rear its ugly head.

When alcoholic fermentation is all wrapped up, most people assume that the wine is then mostly left alone to age. But winemakers know well that there are a lot of adjustments that can be made throughout the cellaring process.

Get some pointers on working with the stylistically diverse Riesling grape, a cool-climate loving noble variety.

With ongoing drought concerns in many wine-growing regions, the practice of deficit irrigation is gaining traction, not only for using less water but also for producing higher-quality wine grapes. Learn about two winemakers’ experience with this technique.

Feedback is critical for winemakers who are looking to advance their hobby and no one should be more critical than you. Learn some of the many roads you can take in order to better your skills at critically tasting your wines.

Dry, crisp rosé wines hold a special place in a lot of wine lovers’ hearts, as a well-made version can be a thing of beauty. Learn some of the key components to producing one yourself.

Most red winemakers will begin alcoholic fermentation shortly after the grape clusters are pressed. But there are some alternative techniques that can be utilized pre-fermentation to try to bring distinctive character to the wines they produce.

Finding high-quality grapes, even in wine country, can be a challenge for new winemakers. Get some advice for sourcing fresh grapes, no matter where you live, as well as how to handle the grapes to get them home safely.

Learn about several grape crushing options, the equipment that can be used, and the processes available to fresh grape winemakers.

Three pro winemakers share how they use pectic enzymes to their advantage to maximize yields, increase color and flavor extraction, and make filtration easier.