Jun-Jul 2021
Live Chat with Dwayne Bershaw
Live Chat with Dwayne Bershaw, which took place on August 3, 2021.
Live Chat with Maureen Macdonald
Live Chat with Maureen Macdonald, which took place on June 24, 2021.
Sur Lie Aging
Aging wines on the lees can add aromatic complexity, soften tannins, enrich mouthfeel, protect it from oxygen, feed malolactic bacteria, and add longterm stability. Learn how to get the most from sur lie aging, and techniques for removing, storing, and reusing lees.
Growing Pains: Aging and packaging big batches
As your winemaking production scales up, so does the space required to store the wine as well as the miscellaneous items that come along with it. Bob Peak guides readers through some of the various bottlenecks that winemakers experience during the aging and bottling processes as their operation grows.
Dear Wes: I asked for questions and you listened!
Two attendees of the Backyard Grape Growing Online Boot Camp
had some follow-up questions; one on their spray protocol, the other about coming back from a devastating loss of vines. Wes dishes out some advice.
Rosehip Wine: My crown of thorns
A common sight in the coastal communities throughout the northeastern part of the U.S. and Canada, rugosa roses produce a rosehip that is commonly made into jam. One adventurous spirit opted to try making wine with it.
Maturation Intervention
No matter how much attention we give a wine, sometimes it will disappoint when tasted for the first time during aging. It may not be faulted, just lacking a desired characteristic. That’s when it is time to intervene. Qualities like flavor, aroma, body, color, or even tannins can all be improved with a little help.
Pét Projects
Pétillant-naturel sparkling wines — which are bottled prior to the conclusion of fermentation — are having a moment. Without any required riddling, disgorging, or extended aging, pét-nats are a perfect fit for home winemakers to try when getting into sparkling wines.
7 Country Wine Recipes
Fruit wines are generally the first thing to come to mind when we hear “country wine,” however the term is much more encompassing than that. We share seven recipes from Jack B. Keller Jr.’s new book release Home Winemaking: The Simple Way to Make Delicious Wine that illustrate just how broad an array of ingredients the term includes.
The ABC’s of MLF
If you make your own wine, no matter what kind, the concept of malolactic fermentation (MLF) should be well embedded in your mind. Learn some of the basics of MLF.
Backsweetening Fruit Wines
Backsweetening is a popular method to balance and bring out the fruit character in fruit wines. We enlist two experts to share their tips to backsweetening success.
Bold Brianna: A strong and healthy grower
Elmer Swenson’s grape breeding program has had a profound effect on the North American wine scene. One such grape to come from his program is Brianna, a grape that required an estimated 93 crosses to produce. Learn about this grape’s heritage as well as how to best work with it.
Adding Carbonation To A Dessert Wine
If you’ve got a carbonation setup at home that you use for your homebrew, cider, mead, or kombucha, you certainly can fizzy up some wine products for yourself. I like your idea
Properly Adding Copper
Ah yes, the classic “I sunk a bunch of pennies in my carboy” tale. Forgetting for a moment that modern pennies contain very little copper, there’s a reason that most winemakers I
Properly Measuring Wine Cap Temperature
That is a great question and I’m really glad you asked. Sometimes when those of us who have been making wines for quite some time write about some technique, process, or concept
Protecting Your Wine From Oxygen During Racking
Excluding oxygen by gassing headspaces and purging containers is one of the most important winemaking jobs we have. Oxygen exposure during aging can create all sorts of problems from premature oxidation and
Protecting Your Wine, Cap Temperature, Copper Sulfate Additions, and Carbonation Help
Oxidation is one of the most common faults among homemade wines. The Wiz has some tips for minimizing exposure during racking along with advice for how to read fermentation temperature, reducing reductive stink with copper, and carbonating a dessert wine.
