Date: Summer 1999

QI have made 2.5-gallon batches of pin cherry wine. Without a recipe to go by, I used my old standby: Chokecherry recipe of 20 plus years. It makes excellent wine with a

I have something to confess. The most perfect, most exquisite wine passed through my racking cane this fall. I’m not bragging or anything; that’s just the way it is. Now, I should

Stop right there! Don’t pour your wine down the drain. Your problem is both curable, and most important for future batches, preventable. It seems you’ve got an overload of tannins in your

Let me start answering your multi-part question by breaking it down. For starters, “fortified” wines are just that. They’ve had alcohol (usually in the form of neutral grape spirits (brandy without the

Your yeast packet is almost guaranteed to be past its prime. Yeast cells, even those that have been freeze-dried, certainly do have an expiration date. Using yeast that is more than six

Plans to build your own grape crusher.

The availability of grape and fruit concentrates makes the home production of fine wines possible no matter where you live. But for some of us, the hours spent in the vineyard, orchard,

No group of grape varieties has generated as much enthusiasm among winemakers recently as Rhône varieties. So great is the demand for them that interested wineries scramble to find the best vineyard

Commercial wineries spend tens of thousands of dollars on all kinds of fancy equipment. Can a home winemaker really expect to create the same type of high-quality wines the pros can without

Bill Hopkins followed a path taken by many American winemakers. A dairy farmer who saw his business fading in the 1970s — at the same time the wine industry was taking off

Hydrometer: An inexpensive and widely available analytical device that measures the specific gravity (relative density) of a solution. Very useful to measure the amount of sugar (in Balling or degrees Brix) in

Yeast, like most living things, have a climate that they prefer. Just as people like warm, sunny weather, yeast, too, like their atmosphere temperate. When things get cold, around 40 °F (4