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Wine Cellar Build

A reader’s basement renovation takes shape.

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Lab Equipment: Storage Cabinet

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Fermentation Temperature Control

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

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Evaporation Clarification, “Big” Reds, and Mold Malady

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

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Broken Barrels, pH Adjustments, and “Chocolate” Wine

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

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Avoiding Sulfites, Adding Copper

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

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Lysozyme, Adding Sugar, and Oak Alternatives

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 b

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Late Malolactic, Wine Kit Ingredients, and Color Questions

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

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Overspiced Situation, Fining Reds, Brown Whites

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

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Fining Fruit Wines, Sourcing Grapes, and Cleaning Agents

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

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Soapy Taste, Wine Pumps, and Testing Sulfite

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

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Perfecting Pyment, Vinifera Vines, and Over-Yeasting

. . . 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

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Making Muscat, Battling VA, Finding Ideal SO₂ Levels

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

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Fun With Filtration, When To Harvest, and Transporting Wine

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

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Brett in the Winery, Hangover Myths, and Grapes In Albuquerque

Brettanomyces is often an ambient microbe in the air we breathe, but that’s no reason to go inviting concentrated and healthy sto

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Stuck Fermentations, Using Tartaric Acid, and Cooking With Wine

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

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“Fruit Floaties”, Sweetening Wine, Free SO₂ levels

Because sulfur dioxide is so easily-oxidizable, hydrogen peroxide naturally ‘finds’ the easily-oxidized SO₂ and the two hopef

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Alternative Sweeteners, Pomace Compost, and Stuck Fermentations

If you add some kind of sweetener that is fermentable (table sugar, grape concentrate, maple syrup, honey, etc.) you risk an uncontrolled re

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Empty Airlocks, Calculating ABV, and Transplanting Vines

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

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Softened Water, High Alcohol Wine, and Tiny Bubbles

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

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Japanese Beetles, Freezing Grapes, and Adjusting Aged Wine

A really innovative and completely natural way to control Japanese beetles is to implement a longer-term biological control program utilizin

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Fermentation Troubles, Natural Fining, and Get Your Swirl On

Some home winemakers cool down must ferments by freezing gallon water jugs and tossing them (closed tightly) into fermenting totes, bins or

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Understanding “Degree Days”, White Film on Wine, and Glass vs. Wood

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Topping Up Your Wine

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

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Importing Juice vs. Fresh Grapes, Wild Fermentations, Sediment In The Bottle

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