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Wine Wizard
Posts
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Flat & Sweet: Wine Wizard
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Determining Ageability, Wine Chemistry, Decanting Advice, and Knocking Down Rot
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Screw Caps and Fruit Wines: Wine Wizard
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Alternative Sweeteners, Pomace Compost, and Stuck Fermentations: Wine Wizard
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Chardonnay Choices, Fruit Wines: Wine Wizard
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Testing options for pH and TA, Yeast choice for a fruit wine: Wine Wizard
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Grape requirements, bentonite and yellow ring: Wine Wizard
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Sugar Conversion Tables, Making Wine from Sugar Cane: Wine Wizard
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Softening The Wine, Using Gum Arabic, and Avoiding a Persistent Sediment
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Reconfiguring the Palate & Properly Adding Acid to a Barrel
The Wizard explores the many sensations that tasters experience as a wine goes from grapes, through fermentation, and into the early stages
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Copper Sulfate Solutions: Wine Wizard
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Gum Arabic, Chilled Reds, and Pinot Noir Advice
A reader wonders about the usefulness of gum arabic in their winemaking process. The Wiz also talks about chilled red wines, the ups and dow
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Cork Variability, MLF Question, pH Testing, and Aceto Problems
A concerned reader asks the Wizard why commercially-purchased wines might have their corks raised. She also answers questions on metabisulfi
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The Sulfite Blues, Curing A Stuck Fermentation and Freezing Grapes
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Preventing Oxidation, Excess Sulfite
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Sparkling Wine & Blackberry Wine: Wine Wizard
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Evaporation Clarification, “Big” Reds, and Mold Malady
Remember, every time you open your barrel, you introduce air and potentially some undesirable spoilage organisms.
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Broken Barrels, pH Adjustments, and “Chocolate” Wine
Oak barrels (and barrels made of other woods, sometimes acacia wood or even cherry wood) are really structurally amazing.
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Avoiding Sulfites, Adding Copper
Pasteurization operates on a sliding scale and its effectiveness depends on a coefficient between time and temperature.
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Lysozyme, Adding Sugar, and Oak Alternatives
Excluding bacteria that can eat malic acid and turn it into lactic acid is the only way to make sure you don’t get refermentation in the b
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Late Malolactic, Wine Kit Ingredients, and Color Questions
Your Zinfandel probably had a good reason (in the wine’s opinion, anyway) why it didn’t go through ML fermentation.
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Overspiced Situation, Fining Reds, Brown Whites
Spices and other added flavorings in home winemaking are one of the trickiest things to get right.
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Fining Fruit Wines, Sourcing Grapes, and Cleaning Agents
Wine clarifiers, or ‘fining agents’ as they (and a whole host of other wine-finishing additives) are called, are creatures of degrees.
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Soapy Taste, Wine Pumps, and Testing Sulfite
I suspect you’ve got a fatty acid issue caused by your stuck/sluggish fermentation. S. cerevisiae can emit fatty acids when under
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Perfecting Pyment, Vinifera Vines, and Over-Yeasting
. . . you could also buy some powdered grape tannin, use oak chips, or even use a cup of strong black tea to add some tannin backbone to the