Techniques
Aging Wine Kits: Tips From the Pros
Kit wines are often consumed fairly young, but great things can happen if you allow the bottles to age longer. Two supply shop owners give guidance and teach the basics of patience and best practices for aging kit wines.
Using Tannins: Purposes, sources, and use in winemaking
Tannins can provide a wine with a lot more than just astringency. They can also be useful in white and rosé wines as well if used properly. Bob Peak gives a tour of the benefits of various tannin products available to hobby winemakers.
Red Hybrid Winemaking
There are some intricacies when making red table wines from hybrid grapes that vinifera winemakers don’t experience — from growing practices, pre-fermentation techniques, and right on through to post-fermentation adjustments.
Bench Trials: Tips from the Pros
Get tips on performing bench trials at home from three pros who utilize bench trials at their day jobs.
Wine Filtration 101
You want to start a heated and emotionally charged discussion on a controversial topic? Ask a group of amateur winemakers for their thoughts on the impact of filtration on wine. Chances are
10 Tips for a Successful Harvest Day
For the home vineyardist, harvest day is the most important — or at least the busiest — day of the year. Planning and preparation is critical in order for everything to run
Determining Ripeness
Determining when grapes are ready to harvest is one of the most important decisions of the entire vintage. Here’s what to look for.
Making Wine From Juice
You may be curious about a way of making wine intermediate between using fresh fruit and making kit wines. Increasingly popular, the hobby of making wine from grape juice comes in two
Minerality in Wine
Terms such as “mineral taste” and “minerality” have entered the modern wine lexicon and into common usage probably by traditionalists in an attempt to link the equally ill-defined concept of terroir to
Cheesemaking: Tips from the Pros
You make your own wine, but have you tried making cheese to go with it?
Fin(d)ing Clarity in the Five S’s
When it comes to clarifying your wine kit, there are five “S’s” that will guide your way: Start, stir, smash, sweep, and suppress.
Adjust Your Must
There are many points throughout the winemaking process where a winemaker must make adjustments
in order to influence the final outcome. When the grapes come into the winery, the very first choices you will make as a winemaker will be done in the unfermented must.
Blending Bench Trials
One of the most useful techniques used in blending wine is performing bench trials, which is the process of treating a series of small wine samples with varying degrees of conditions. In
Dealing with Excessive Heat in the Vineyard
Relentless heat can be an anxious time for winegrape growers. But the worry of vineyard heat stress doesn’t need to cause stress in the grape-grower’s life. Two professional winemakers discuss dealing with excessive heat in your own vineyard.
Micro-oxidation in White Wines: Tips from the Pros
Not all white wines should be treated equally when it comes to processing juice. Here are some helpful tips and insights winemakers should consider when they approach their next batch of white wine — when to go for a more oxidative approach to the juice and when to go for less.
Field Blending
Blends are most often made from varietal wines prior to bottling, but field blending, where all of the varieties are harvested and fermented together, has its own benefits.
Detecting, Measuring, and Preventing Volatile Acidity
You’ve worked long and hard to craft that awesome red wine but now, you go down to the cellar to taste a sample out of the carboy or oak barrel to see
Fermentation and Aging Containers
Fermentation and aging vessels winemakers have to decide between include oak, glass, plastic, and stainless steel. Each has its own pros and cons to be weighed.
Six Essential Winemaking Techniques
Commercial winemakers and wine industry professionals don’t become experts overnight. It can take many vintages to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in a home or commercial winery. But that
Making Mead: Tips from the Pros
Looking to try something new? How about making mead, also known as honey wine. Meads come in many different forms, from dry to sweet, with added fruit (melomel), malt (braggot), spices (metheglin)
Cold Climate Grape Growing
Indeed, for 4–6 months of the year, the frigid and snowy landscape hardly seems like a great place to plant a vineyard. Temperatures in January and February drop sufficiently low to kill
Making Sherry-Style Wines
Sherry is the fortified wine from Jerez, Spain, made in soleras and conditioned with flor yeast.
Big Reds: How To Make A Blockbuster Wine
. . .lurking inside the heads of many home winemakers is the urge to make an absolute blockbuster, a jaw-dropping, mind-bending, 800-pound gorilla of a wine.
Yeast Nutrient Strategies
Grape juice is a pretty tough environment if you’re a yeast cell. The pH is low, there’s high osmotic stress (stress from the environmental conditions being such that the flow of water
Using South American Grapes for a Second Winemaking Season
And you thought there was only one time each year to make wine from fresh grapes; in the autumn season. But, surprise, there is another whole world south of the Equator. As