Don’t Miss Live Online Workshop on Mastering Hybrid Grape Winemaking February 20. Three hours of tips and techniques. Also available later as video replay. Click here for event and registration details.
Learn how to personalize your kit wine with tweaks and experiments. Plus, tips on filtering and turning your wine into apéritifs.
Nearly 700 wines made from kits were entered into more than 30 different categories and judged in the 2018 WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition. So which kits made the best wines? Here are the top 100 scoring wine kits according to the judges.
If you want to serve a crystal clear and microbial stable wine, it will require filtration. Explore the “how” and “why” of wine filtration, along with the equipment needed to do it.
One of the best things about wine kits is that they are relatively easy to make into great tasting wine if you just follow the directions. However, once you’ve mastered that skill, you may be tempted to tweak the instructions or ingredients to customize your wine more to your liking.
When you make your own aperitif wines at home — such as sweet and dry vermouth — you can then make your own cocktails with them. Learn the basics of making these drinks, plus three cocktail recipes sure to appease even your guests who aren’t wine drinkers.
Crush day can be a roller-coaster ride of emotions: Excitement, anxiety, joy, frustration, and of course, exhaustion. A reader tells of his own personal crush day magic and why he does it year-in and year-out. (Hint: Because he can.)
Sulfites get a bad rap in the world outside of true wine aficionados. Alex Russan takes readers on a journey through the world of sulfites and describes a couple schools of thought regarding its use throughout the winemaking process.
With the holiday season approaching, presenting your homemade wine to friends and family should be a point of pride. Bob Peak offers readers several pointers to take a fun and festive approach to an evening pairing of your wine with guests.
Kit wines are often consumed fairly young, but great things can happen if you allow the bottles to age longer. Two supply shop owners give guidance and teach the basics of patience and best practices for aging kit wines.
Grape descriptors and the region of origin were often used in the Old World in the naming of a grape. In the case of the Trebbiano family of grapes, this was indeed the case. Unfortunately what they didn’t quite know is the family is much more diverse than just a few varietals.
A concerned reader asks the Wizard why commercially-purchased wines might have their corks raised. She also answers questions on metabisulfite use before malolactic fermentation, when to re-test for pH, and dealing with Acetobacter issues.
