Techniques

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.

If you are a winemaker looking to boost your wine’s quality, then tracking pH is a must. Bob Peak introduces the chemistry behind the numbers we obtain and how to use them to our advantage.

Hybrid grapes pose certain challenges to winemakers including higher acidity and lower tannins. Three cool-climate winemakers share their advice to create a balanced wine from these grapes.

Titratable acidity, or TA, is often viewed as a more advanced test, but it shouldn’t be. With a simple kit and a good pH meter, anyone can measure TA in any wine. Bob Peak has some straightforward advice for winemakers to help you bring balance to your wines through TA.

We’d all love to make wine from the perfect grapes picked with ideal sugars, acidity, and pH. Unfortunately, often due to reasons beyond our control, that is not always how grapes arrive at the home winery. In that case, the winemaker has a number of decisions that must be made.

Sometimes the acidity of your grapes, juice, or wine will need to be adjusted. Learn some of the finer details surrounding how, and when, to make those acid adjustments to your wine.

The better you plan for grapes to come in, the smoother the big day of harvest and crushing grapes will go. Do you have all of the equipment on hand and cleaned? Is the space cleared? Start planning now.

Sooner or later, most serious winemakers conclude that it isn’t good enough to simply follow a recipe blindly. That’s a bit too much like painting-by-numbers. The expression of one’s own skill and

You might be wondering why someone would want to bother tinkering with must when trying to get the grapes smashed and into the bucket is challenge enough. The short answer is because to make good wine you want to accomplish two things during fermentation: to keep your yeast happy and to exclude other microbes from interfering.