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Over the years I have accumulated lots of pieces of fairly delicate labware to perform a number of winemaking tests. After recently remodeling my garage winery with some cast off kitchen cabinets

This cooling setup keeps wine must within just a few degrees of target temperatures.

Remember, every time you open your barrel, you introduce air and potentially some undesirable spoilage organisms.

Oak barrels (and barrels made of other woods, sometimes acacia wood or even cherry wood) are really structurally amazing.

Pasteurization operates on a sliding scale and its effectiveness depends on a coefficient between time and temperature.

Excluding bacteria that can eat malic acid and turn it into lactic acid is the only way to make sure you don’t get refermentation in the bottle.

Your Zinfandel probably had a good reason (in the wine’s opinion, anyway) why it didn’t go through ML fermentation.

Spices and other added flavorings in home winemaking are one of the trickiest things to get right.

Wine clarifiers, or ‘fining agents’ as they (and a whole host of other wine-finishing additives) are called, are creatures of degrees.

I suspect you’ve got a fatty acid issue caused by your stuck/sluggish fermentation. S. cerevisiae can emit fatty acids when under fermentive stress . . .

. . . you could also buy some powdered grape tannin, use oak chips, or even use a cup of strong black tea to add some tannin backbone to the wine if it’d be tough for you to obtain grape skins.

No matter which strain you use, be sure that you read up on all the specifications from the manufacturer around ideal performance conditions.

. . . a lot of sediment we find in wines actually forms after the wine is bottled, and is nothing that filtration can control.

Brettanomyces is often an ambient microbe in the air we breathe, but that’s no reason to go inviting concentrated and healthy stocks of it into your cellar.

I find that when sugar is that low, the process of re-starting actually lowers the overall quality and you’re better off bottling slightly sweet (sterile filtered).

Because sulfur dioxide is so easily-oxidizable, hydrogen peroxide naturally ‘finds’ the easily-oxidized SO₂ and the two hopefully cancel each other out.

If you add some kind of sweetener that is fermentable (table sugar, grape concentrate, maple syrup, honey, etc.) you risk an uncontrolled re-fermentation in the bottle, which is never fun.

Most top-scoring red wines made in the U.S. are bottled after 18–24 months in barrel.

Water softeners add another wrinkle, namely because they tend to add a lot of sodium.

A really innovative and completely natural way to control Japanese beetles is to implement a longer-term biological control program utilizing one of the insect’s natural enemies, the ‘milky spore’ bacteria.

Some home winemakers cool down must ferments by freezing gallon water jugs and tossing them (closed tightly) into fermenting totes, bins or trash cans of must during a punchdown.

Q Is there any wine grape that can be successfully grown in an area with a heat summation of 1,200? I am near the Pacific Coast and summers are not very warm,

What does “topping up” mean and when should it be done?

I prefer to have as much information as I can about where my raw material is coming from, and being able to handle the actual grapes is one way to help you get there.

Buying your first lug of grapes can be intimidating, but it does not need to be. Get some pointers before committing to your first box of grapes.