Articles

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

A Brief Glossary of Some Key Terms Brix: A scale of measuring sugar concentration in grapes, juice, must and wine. Instruments such as refractometers and hydrometers are used to measure degrees Brix

Kit Wine by Jeff ChorniakA typical wine kit contains only a few ingredients: A bag of preserved grape concentrate, yeast and the additives you need to make wine. Not all kits include

Welcome winemakers! Although you’ve entered a part of the website labeled our “Beginner’s Guide,” we purposely designed it to incorporate the essential skills and knowledge that successful winemakers of all levels must

Here’s the top 100 wine kits from the 2016 WineMaker Magazine International Amateur Wine Competition

A look at processing grapes after harvest.

Find out how to replicate the method of making Amarone — the famed red “straw wine” from the Valpolicella zone of Italy’s Veneto province made from grapes partially dried on straw mats to concentrate their juice.

Barbera is a favorite among winemakers because its high acidity makes it a useful grape for blending and also a unique varietal wine. Get tips to make your own Barbera wines at home.

Hard cider doesn’t have to be made from apples. Try making a pear cider (perry) this summer!

Nothing feels as satisfying and authentic as making your first batch of wine from fresh grapes. And there’s no better time to try it than in early autumn, when grapes all over

A few months ago, I decided to open a bottle from my collection of homemade wines. I selected an Austrian red and pulled the cork. The wine was healthy, almost vibrant. It

A reader starts a vineyard in New England. “It is great to wake up in the morning, make a cup of coffee and walk out to the vineyard to check on the vines, training off shoots as I go along.”

This past year brought challenges and rewards for home vineyardists — and also a lot of questions for our vineyard expert Wes Hagen.

Pinotage is the most recognized — though not the most widely grown — South African red wine grape.

In this article, Michael Larner discusses the wines of the Rhône region of France, and one of the most important winemaking parts of Rhône winemaking is blending. Learn about the basics of