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Cleaning and sanitizing is the boring, dull part of the process. Never mind that this is the most important part of winemaking. It is a lot like work, so let’s do it well and get back to having fun!

Get an understanding of pH, why it’s important, how to measure pH, and how to correct it.

The first “wine kits” sold in North America were bricks of compressed grapes, shipped to eastern states from California during prohibition. Home winemaking was as illegal as any other alcohol producing activity

Why bother with wine competitions? It’s a fair question. Entering a competition means putting your wine up for evaluation against those of other winemakers, and that can be a bit daunting. Some

Americans love the taste of blueberries, and with good reason. Blueberries are uniquely American. Maybe that’s why I always think about blueberry wine when summer rolls around and I start planning Fourth

You all seem to have the same problem, so I thought I’d answer you all together. Acid adjustment, or better, achieving the right acid balance, is one of the arts of winemaking.

Hold on there, tiger! If you’ve got a standard 0.44 gram Campden tablet and you’re putting it in one gallon (3.8 L) of wine, you’re blasting it with 66 mg/L sulfur dioxide,

Dear Wine Wizard, I’m new to wine making but I have made beer and mead for three years. What types of grapes and yeast are used to make lambrusco wine? Also the

Dear Wine Wizard, After I stabilized my wine, I added French medium toast oak beans to the Chardonnay 3/4 cup (new beans), Sauvignon Blanc 1/3 cup (new beans), Ruisseau Blanc 3/4 cup

Sooner or later, most serious winemakers conclude that it isn’t good enough to simply follow a recipe blindly. That’s a bit too much like painting-by-numbers. The expression of one’s own skill and

Spring is often seen as a time for cleaning, and there’s plenty for the home winemaker to do after a long winter. This includes scrubbing away the grime, dust and cobwebs that

Wine Wizard replies: Your question is complex. In fact, it could lead to pages upon pages of response if I elucidated upon “all those chemicals” (and many of them are not really

Wine Wizard replies: If you’ve seen a lot of home winemaking recipes that recommend pounds upon pounds of refined sugar, it’s because refined sugar is the cheapest agent available to home winemakers

Dear Wine Wizard, I made homebrewed beer for a long time, but during the last couple of years I have gravitated more towards making wine and mead. I know that it’s safe

The solera system of wine aging was developed by the Spanish and Portuguese as a way to provide wines of a constant average age, as well as to ensure a certain homogeneity

The moment of truth in winemaking often comes when you taste your wine to see how it turned out and you wish it could be just a touch better. Maybe the wine

Let’s try to demystify sulfite by reviewing some fundamental chemistry. This will help us understand how sulfite protects wine and how much “free SO2” we are introducing into our wine.

Winemaking is not a science but rather an art. There are many opinions on the pros and cons of the various processes that winemakers use. The subject of filtration is one such area of great debate that has polarized enologists, wine sellers and wine enthusiasts alike. Some advocate the practice of filtration, others believe that fining is sufficient, while many traditionalists simply let nature take its course.

To understand how pruning your backyard grapevines will affect growth, crop load and wine quality, you must first understand how grapevines grow in the wild. When vines sprout from seed, the vine

During the mid 1980s in New Zealand, when the Cloudy Bay Winery captured the attention of the world marketplace with its version of Sauvignon Blanc, a new era was born. Today, many

Tom Petuskey East Brunswick, New Jersey Tom has been making wine since 1981 and has won more than 100 awards in state and national amateur wine competitions. His most recent awards were

After crawling our way out of the large piles of boxes, envelopes and packages that have been collecting on the floor of the editorial department for the past two months, we managed

You’ve followed all the rules. From the arrival of the grapes through pressing, racking, aging and bottling, you have meticulously scrutinized every step of the winemaking process. Nothing has been overlooked in

Brettanomyces is a particularly nasty yeast that is often the bane of the collective existence of many winemakers. Its foul-smelling byproducts have often been called “barnyardy” or “mouse pee-like” on the sensory

As home winemakers, there’s nothing like adding a new trick to our repertoire. Anything that makes our wine a little better is definitely a good thing. For those reasons, you should explore