June-July 2024
Flower Power
You can make wine from just about anything. From dandelions and roses to ferns and parsnips, we share advice and recipes for wine from flowers, ferns, and root vegetables.
Elevate Your Wine with Wine Cocktails
Looking to enjoy some of your homemade wines a different way? Try using them as ingredients in wine-based cocktails! We share tips and recipes to make cocktails that are sure to be a hit at gatherings.
Pinot Grigio: The Underrated Superstar
Pinot Grigio is often an introductory white wine for consumers — light, refreshing, though unremarkable. That doesn’t have to be the case, though! Learn from winemakers across the world how they craft Pinot Grigio that will rival any white wine’s complexity.
Special Purpose Wine Yeasts
Sometimes we want a wine yeast that will strictly ferment a wine dry in the conditions available to it, but other instances require special purpose wine yeasts. Learn about yeast strains that serve more purposes than simply completing fermentation — be it for high-vigor, malic acid management, minimizing faults, and more.
Apples, Meet Grape Pomace
After pressing grapes for wine, a home winemaker decided seven years ago to add the pomace to their fresh-pressed apple juice to learn the impact it would have on cider production. They’ve continued this experiment every year since, with some variation, and are sharing the results.
Summer Care in the Vineyard
The summer is a critical time in the home vineyard. Wes Hagen shares the physiological needs of mature vines in the summer and lays out a schedule for what growers should be doing in the warmest months.
Fabulous Frontenac Gris
Our newest columnist, Maureen Macdonald, shares her own experiences and advice for crafting a Frontenac Gris of any style in her first “Varietal Focus” column.
Monitoring Malolactic, Adding Skins, Timing Purchases, Airlocks
The Wine Wizard shares the signs to look for and ways to monitor malolactic fermentation, offers tips on adding supplemental grape skins to a red wine, and when to move a red wine’s fermentation from open containers to under an airlock.
When to Add an Airlock
Kaboom! Nobody likes an exploding carboy! “Fermentation happens,” as one of my professors at UC-Davis always used to say. Sounds like the perfect home winemaking meme to me (or t-shirt). As wine
Timing Purchases
That’s a great question and one, like so much in winemaking, that can be answered by a bit of a compromise. You’re on the right track by ordering your supplies right before
Adding Skins to a Red Ferment
There’s an ancient tradition of making wine using skins “donated” from other fermentations and projects. The one you list above is one such scenario. The most well-known incidence of this practice includes
Monitoring Malolactic
MLF is a bit confusing for some because it’s called a “fermentation” but it’s certainly not as active, visible, smellable, and in your face as your primary sugar-to-alcohol fermentation. MLF happens when
Bottling Basics
Familiarize yourself with the critical steps and equipment required to bottle your wine.
South African Wine Safari
We recap and share pictures from a recent WineMaker trip with readers to the wine regions of South Africa.
2024 Wine Education
Looking to advance your winemaking knowledge? Check out these wine education programs to start your journey down the path to a higher education in winemaking and the business of wine.
