Articles

. . . Merlot is the most common grape variety grown in France with about 280,000 acres.

. . . Sicily’s legacy of red wine is all about Nero d’Avola, second only to Catarratto Bianco. There are almost 18,000 hectares (about 46,000 acres) of Nero in Sicily.

An introduction to fining wine with egg whites.

If you are looking for a cold-tolerant red grape, Marquette might be the varietal for you. Bred in Minnesota, this hybrid can withstand temperatures as low as -30 °F (-34 °C).

If you want to make good homemade wine, you should learn to manage your wines’ YAN — yeast assimilable nitrogen.

There are lots of possibilities for adding extracts, flavorings, herbs, and spice when you are making wine at home. We explore a variety of options.

To understand Montepulciano the grape, you also have to understand the difference with Montepulciano the place. Chik Brenneman takes you on a tour of eastern Tuscany, Italy in this issue.

A home winemaker from California’s Sierra Foothills shares his design for an air-conditioned wine storage room he built for his garage.

Many hobby winemakers believe that fermentation temperature control is beyond their reach — but this isn’t so! Discover how to keep temperatures in the proper range.

Aging your wine in an oak barrel can do wonders for your wine. It can also ruin it. Before you dive in head first, learn all there is to know about aging in oak. Plus: Using oak alternatives.

Build this basket press using HDPE plastic.

If you have a free wall in your garage, you can have your entire winery organized there. See the plans by Steve Hughes.

“A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.” -Friedrich Nietzsche Man,

A reader’s basement renovation takes shape.

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.