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Tips and techniques on testing your wine, plus guidance on gearing up your home wine lab. Also, advanced color extraction for red wines.
Gum arabic is a natural anti-flocculant with a list of benefits that includes helping prevent tartrate crystals from forming, smoothing out young red wines, and adding mouthfeel to thin wines. Get to know this important additive every winemaker should have on hand.
Take the guesswork out of winemaking by performing tests on your juice, must, and wine. We run through the most critical tests, as well as how and when they should be done.
Learn about the lab equipment you should consider investing in for each stage of the winemaking process.
When changes to aroma or structure are desired to achieve a more balanced, pleasing wine, you should always start with benchtop trials to dial in optimal addition rates. Learn how to get the most from your trials before adjusting your entire batch.
More than 100 home winemakers came to Sacramento, California, in May for WineMaker’s 16th and final in-person conference to take part in educational seminars, hands-on workshops, tastings, and to share in their passion for wine.
The Wiz offers advice on maximizing color extraction and shares the impact temperature plays in it. Plus: How cold is too cold to age wine, why a wine may require long decanting times to open up, and techniques for taming tannins.
With small berries and a high grape skin-to-juice ratio, Petite Sirah makes a wine that is incredibly pigmented, rich in black fruit character, and with elegant and lasting tannins that make a great impression upon the drinker’s palate.
Seeing so many brambly hedges of fresh blackberries along a dirt road, a woman with a stubborn curiosity and desire to create something herself decided to try her hand at her first batch of wine. She shares the excitement that ran through her during the process, issues that arose, and how deeply rewarding the experience was.
Clark Smith offers ways to extract the most from your grapes by digging into the chemistry of must correction — including methods to boost color, the impact adding sugar or water may have, and other techniques to keep in mind.
