Articles

How ripe your grapes are when picked is one of the most important factors in determining what your wine will taste like. Here is a closer look at how a grape’s development affects the resulting wine.

Because of their chemical composition under wine pH (acidity) and fermentation conditions it’s quite possible these color compounds won’t stay red, or in solution, very long.

TCA, or the “corked” off-aroma, is caused by ambient molds interacting with a chlorine molecule of some kind, usually from domestic water supply.

When done using your winemaking equipment, make sure it is properly cleaned and stored so it will be ready to use next harvest season.

Wine and chocolate are a match made in heaven. But it doesn’t have to be two separate delicacies. Home winemakers can actually combine the two by infusing wine with chocolate.

Most closures are packaged pre-sanitized, usually with sulfur dioxide in the sealed bags that come from the manufacturer.

There are temperature ranges advisable for fermenting all wine styles, but how does each end of that range affect the aroma, taste, and body of your wine?

Here are the top 100 wine kits from the 2017 WineMaker Magazine International Amateur Wine Competition.

Learn the basics of what sulfur dioxide is, as well as when and how to use sulfite in your winemaking.

To maximize your chances of a successful in-the-bottle fermentation you need to prepare a starter culture.

I would argue that the rapidity with which the sugar is consumed (and the density is lowered) is almost as important as the level of sugar itself . . .

What you’re experiencing is the precipitation over time of all sorts of complex tannins and colored compounds.

In my experience, doing a traditional cold stability where you chill the wine down and then filter off any precipitation won’t shift the acidity enough to notice it in the taste.

Most folks I talk to say that sodium bentonite and calcium bentonite are interchangeable in winemaking.

Some of the SO₂ gas created by the sulfur wick certainly will transfer into the wine as sulfur dioxide.

It’s very possible this mold bloom was caused by a change in the weather or a change in your cellar environment.

It is entirely normal for the first soaking of a barrel to produce a dark-colored water.

Interestingly, a cork may smell “tainted” and the wine below it might be just fine, or, better said the wine in the bottle may be below your TCA threshold.

To quote one of my favorite UC-Davis professors, the newly-retired Dr. Linda Bisson, “No human pathogen can survive in wine.”

I actually prefer using a sock or some kind of bag rather than just having chips float loose on the surface.

You might want to try gradually introducing a little more oxygen into your winemaking process, especially early on when wines are more resilient to shifts in redox potential. Reductive off-odors may come from many sources, but thanks to new yeast strains available to winemakers, fermentation doesn’t need to be one of them.

Oxidation, whether microbial (metabolically), chemical (directly reacting with environmental oxygen), or enzymatic can degrade color and cause less than optimal conditions for the survival
of colored compounds.

Fill It Up With all the preparatory work — rinsing, sanitizing and more rinsing — bottling can become overwhelming as one’s production increases. That can quickly turn into many hours of bottling

Country wine is the informal term that has been used for years to define fermented beverages made from ingredients other than grapes. This can include fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs. Wine made

Grape Wine Ah yes . . . grapes! Now that we’ve covered the science behind the winemaking process, you are ready to gather some grapes and start making wine from scratch. From