Import Source: Joomla

Seven important tips to remember when making your next wine from a kit.

Two pros offer advice to make a great blueberry wine at home.

A saturated, dark-ruby colored, full-bodied wine with a velvety texture and round mouthfeel, oodles of blackberry aromas and oak flavor overtones with just a hint of spiciness, all with a persistent, memorable

Country wines. The name evokes a cottage in a peaceful countryside, set amid fields of lush vegetation, with birds and bees blissfully coasting on the late-summer breeze. Imagine hearing someone in the

As WineMaker celebrates its first five years of publishing, we stop for a minute to reflect on the classic world in which we’re immersed — the world of wine. Who could ever

Blending is fine; but if you don’t have enough suitable wine to lower the alcohol to a point you like, make it into a dessert wine. When faced with a 17 percenty

My condolences on experiencing your first visitation by the ever present, but never welcome, Drosophila melanogaster — more commonly known as the common fruit fly. These prolific and pesky little airborne bugs

Has this ever happened to you? You bottle what seems to be your next, greatest batch of wine, carefully set it aside to age for as long as you can possibly stand

To filter or not to filter, that is the question. For the home winemaker it often is less a question of quality than a question of cash flow or wanting to be

Wine Wizard replies: If you’re looking for a way to boost acid without adding extra sugar, stick to acid blend. Using grape-juice concentrate as an additional fermenting agent in fruit wines, on

D. Genasci (southern Oregon) asks: “I am harvesting Pinot Noir and am getting rather strange readings — 22 °Brix, pH of 3.4 and acid at 0.25. The grapes are grown on gravelly

Winners from the 2002 WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition

The ancient science of identifying grapevines by their physical characteristics is called ampelography and, you’ll be happy to know, it is a relatively well-documented field. As you can imagine, in the days

More experienced winemakers than yourself have spent eons trying to ponder the conundrum of a stuck fermentation. If you wanted the wine to be dry and it ended up sweet, it means

This chart illustrates the average nutrients removed from soil per acre (rounded off in pounds) in a producing vineyard per year (at 2.5 tons per acre, or about 5 pounds of fruit

Pesky cloudy wines! Sediments in the bottle! There is nothing more frustrating to home winemakers than a wine that will not clear or that continues to throw sediments in the bottle. Making

Pinot at a Glance Pinot Noir is a heralded red table wine. It is usually made in a dry style that features delicate fruit aromas and flavors. The wine typically has a

Winter is a good time to take a critical look at your cellar techniques. With a nod to the new year and its requisite resolutions, we asked two professional winemakers to discuss

Learn to make your own Port-style wine at home.

You: a happy winemaking citizen, going about your lawful fermentation business, enjoying the marvellous convenience and quality that the wine-kit industry has provided you. Your kit wine: usually a tractable and pleasant

View the winning labels of the 2002 WineMaker Label Contest.

Ah yes, the beloved fluted tops. I’ve heard many justifications for them from various folks, usually that the tops help you to pour the wine without dripping down the side of the

The Wine Wizard replies: It’s illegal for commercial winemakers to add anything non-Vitis vinifera to their table wine and still have it be labeled as such. However, I’m sure that many an

Mead is a classic fermented beverage with a long history. Ancient text and drawings, some dating back as far as 4000 BC, mention both wine and mead. Several Biblical writings describe this

Dear Wine Wizard, I desperately need to know how to cool my primary. I use two 50-gallon barrels to ferment my wine and am tired of using frozen one-gallon plastic jugs. There