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Award-Winning Red Wine Blends Roundtable

Five top medal winners from the WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition share the secrets of their red wine blending success.


Build a Champagne Bottle Capper

Recently Brew Your Own magazine did a story about the pneumatic bottle capper that I had built to cap beer bottles. A short time later, I was contacted by WineMaker Magazine asking


Making Tropical Fruit Wine

Tropical fruit obviously are those native to the tropics. While the absolute number of fruit native to that area is disputed, at least 235 — more than twice that of the non-tropics


Petit Verdot: The forgotten Bordeaux blend grape

Petit Verdot is one of the “big five” grapes that make up a Bordeaux blend. Learn more about this red blender.


Empty Airlocks

It sounds to me like some “bad bugs” (ambient bacteria or yeast cells) got into your wine. After four years of aging, having a batch infected due to a bad airlock must


Making Late Harvest Wines: Tips from the Pros

Late harvest wines are made using grapes affected by the mold Botrytis, which dehydrates the grapes. We’ve pooled advice from three pros with numerous accolades for their dessert wines to help you


Malolactic Fermentation for Beginners

A quick explanation of what malolactic fermentation is, and how/when you may want to do it.


A Family Tradizione

A Brattleboro, Vermont man carries on his Italian family’s home winemaking tradition.


Grape Growing Q&A

Grape growing questions answered!


Using Outside Labs to Run Analysis Tests on your Wine

There is lots of information out there about how to run various juice and wine analytical procedures at home if you want to do that. If you do not want to run


A Year in a Home Vineyard

Grapevine Dormancy The beginning of the calendar year in my Hyde Park, New York home vineyard is when the vines are in dormancy. This is a period of time when the grapevine


Tannin Additions in Wine Kits

Making kit wines doesn’t have to be only about following directions. Improve your wines by using tannin additions at various stages.


Top 100 Wine Kits 2014

This past April 2014, over 50 experienced judges evaluated a total of 1,460 wine kit entries as part of the 2014 WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition. This large collection of kit entries


Vidal Blanc

Vidal Blanc was originally develloped for Cognac production in the cold maritime regions of western France. Today it is a go-to grape in the US Northeast and Midwest as well as Canada. Plus, a recipe for Vidal icewine.


Softened Water In Wine?

That is a wonderful question! It’s estimated that it takes anywhere from 2–10 gallons (8–38 L) of water to make a gallon (4 L) of wine. Most of that estimate is for


Vineyard Winter Maintenance: Tips from the Pros

All done using their energy to grow shoots, grapes and leaves, vines in the winter begin storing water prior to the first frost and then go into dormancy. That doesn’t mean those


Stopping Fermentation

Learn how to stop fermentation before reaching dryness, plus when and why a winemaker may wish to do so.


Grape Stomping Party

For my birthday, I’d like to have a party where we step on grapes,” said my now fiancée four years ago. “Huh?” “Yeah, let’s step on grapes just like Lucille Ball did


Co-Inoculation with Wine Yeasts and Bacteria

Ask 5 winemakers and you may get 6 opinions about co-inocculation. But what does the science say?


Maintaining a Home Wine Cellar

Here are some tips and suggestions on cellaring your homemade wine and maintaining the cellar itself. The cellar “The cellar” has a wide range of interpretations for home winemakers. If you have


Home Vineyard Extreme Cold Weather Tips

In this article I will discuss the degrees of cold temperature damage that can occur in grapevines, techniques to assess that damage, and ways to increase the likelihood that your remaining live


Oxidation in Winemaking

The early signs of oxidation are orange to brown colors developing in your wine. In white wine, the same exact wine (pictured above) can go from white (left) to brown (right) if


Winemaking Tips from Bordeaux

Bordeaux. The mere mention of the name conjures up images of centuries-old chateaus, pristine vineyards and superlative wines that have set the highest standards the world over. Bordeaux wine styles are the


Adding Sugar to your Wine

Step 1: Measuring What You Have The first step in figuring out how much sugar to add is to find out how much is present in the starting material/juice. These days, most


Fermenting & Degassing Wine Kits

In this article I’m going to go into detail on the reasons behind two of the four most confusing concepts in kit winemaking: 1) Temperature, and why higher is better, and 2)


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