technique

Posts

• Technique

  Hard Cider Variations: Tips from the Pros

  Fall is here and there is an abundance of apples available and ready to be fermented. Three experts share advice for three different types o

• Technique

  Balancing Wine’s Structure: Techniques to add and remove tannins

  Tannins are a big piece of the large puzzle when balancing many styles of wine. It’s important to understand ways to increase or decrease

• Technique

  Lees, Sur Lie Aging, and Bâttonage

  Learn about the lees that we find in wine and how we can use them to our advantage.

• Technique

  Pressing Like the Pros: Tips from the Pros

  Do you whole-cluster press? Separate free-run juice and press fractions? Maximize juice collection through high pressure? There are a lot of

• Technique

  A Nitro Boost: Nitrogen’s role in primary fermentation

  Wine was made for millennia with little intervention from humans. But let’s be honest, we have no idea how those wines tasted. Today we kn

• Technique

  Harvest Checklist: Pre-planning for success

  Why make harvest/crush day more stressful than it needs to be? With a solid game plan things should run smoothly. One of the best ways to ge

• Technique

  Hyperoxidation

  As a home winemaker, you’ve likely spent years taking every precaution at your disposal to assure that your juice does not oxidize prior t

• Technique

  Site Planning and Prep: Designing a modern backyard vineyard

  For anyone who plans on creating a small-to-moderate-sized backyard vineyard, this column should be mandatory reading. Because the best advi

• Technique

  Using Oak Alternatives: Cutting into the granular details

  There is no denying that oak alternatives are a lot gentler on the wallet and on the environment. Bob Peak takes a spin through oak chemistr

• Technique

  Delicious Endeavors: The science of food-wine pairings

  Approaching food-wine pairings can be complex given the nearly endless options available . . . but there is a science to it. Learn the basic

• Technique

  Wine from Frozen Must: Tips from the Pros

  When you want to make wines from grapes but it isn’t harvest season, one option home winemakers have is purchasing buckets of frozen must

• Technique

  Prepping Wine For Competition

  If you’ve got a wine aging in your cellar you would like unbiased, expert opinions on, then entering it in a competition for judging is on

• Technique

  Dear Wes: A new vintage of backyard Q&As

  The reader letters have been piling up, so Wes decides it’s come that time again to pick up the pen and share some of the most useful ques

• Technique

  Tune Up: Calibrating your wine testing equipment

  What good is having a thermometer or titration kit if the numbers you are getting from them are off? Make sure you are properly calibrating

• Technique

  Finding Balance with Hybrids

  Hybrid grapes pose certain challenges to winemakers including higher acidity and lower tannins. Three cool-climate winemakers share their ad

• Technique

  Versatile Vino: Using wine in other hobbies

  There is so much more you can do with wine than simply drinking it. Bob Peak walks readers through several side projects winemakers can perf

• Technique

  Put Some Sparkle In Your Wines

  There are several techniques a home winemaker can create bubbles for their wine. Learn about the methods for crafting a sparkling wine of yo

• Technique

  Making Lemonade: Vineyard fixes for underwhelming grapes

  Not every harvest is going to be perfect. When the grapes come in at less than ideal numbers or with other “flaws,” make sure you’re w

• Technique

  Going The Distance: Crafting age-worthy wines

  When you set your sights on making a “keeper” wine, one you plan to lay down for several years, there are certain techniques you can emp

• Technique

  Cooking With Wine

  Wine isn’t just the best beverage to pair with food, it’s also great to use as an ingredient in meals. With that in mind, we asked some

• Technique

  Maceration Enzymes: Making the most of these additions

  There are a lot of enzyme products available to winemakers, but in general they can be broken into just a few classes. Learn when and why a

• Technique

  Flex Your Terroir: Expressing your white wines

  Terroir has been a bit of an esoteric topic for a long time in winemaking. But as we come to learn more about it we are figuring out ways to

• Technique

  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 wit

• Technique

  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 com

• Technique

  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