Techniques

Making wine in small batches, usually from 3 to 5 liters (3 to 5 quarts), is both easier and at the same time more exacting than making wine in much larger batches.

Are you ready to move up from small batches of wine? In this article we are going to discuss the specifics of making “big” batches of wine — that is, 10 gallons

As in many fields — health promoting and weight-loss diets come to mind — that have grown from unfounded beliefs and around traditions, with newfound scientific knowledge proving or disproving long-held theories,

Growing grapes organically, like any other crop, is often more work than using synthetic fertilizers, solutions and sprays. But in the end, many winemakers who embrace organic growing believe the resulting wines

The failure rate of wine made from kits is very low. Looking back at my database for the last 14 years and eliminating the weirder stuff (you simply would not believe how

Oak barrels have long been used primarily for aging red wines but also to shape the style of certain white varietals, such as Chardonnay, into fuller-bodied wines. Oak wood imparts what is

In ancient Greece and Rome, honey was sometimes stirred into wine just before serving. Maybe they just liked the taste of honey. More likely, though, the sweetness of the honey corrected some

Jean-Antoine Chaptal lacked one major benefit we enjoy today: The work in microbiology by Louis Pasteur. (Chaptal lived from 1756 to 1832 and Pasteur lived from 1822 to 1895.) Chaptal was, nonetheless,

first wine, beginner winemaking

Over the past few years I have made larger ­­­and larger batches of wine, and as a result the number of carboys I use has really added up. Each year I try

While kegged wine has become fairly common in some bars, home winemakers still traditionally bottle. Learn some of the basics to kegging your wine.

Whole cluster pressing (foregoing the step of crushing and destemming the grapes) is most often done to make high-end white wines. The technique creates a more delicate and less astringent wine by

Gum arabic can do so many great things for your wines, from improving mouthfeel, making a thin wine taste fuller bodied, rounding out rough edges of grape tannins, increasing persistence of bubbles in sparkling wine, prolonging the action of metatartaric acid, to treating iron-induced oxidation problems.

The word “fortified” is prohibited on commercial wine labels in the United States. Yet we are surrounded by a fascinating array of fortified wines when we visit a good wine shop. Fortified

Home winemakers know pH and acid are related when they make wine. Beyond that, the details sometimes get a little fuzzy. Shedding some light on how these important parameters are — and

An aroma kit will help improve your ability to pick out aromas in a glass of wine. You can buy a kit for over $100, or make your own for a fraction of that.

Five top medal winners from the WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition share the secrets of their red wine blending success.

Recently Brew Your Own magazine did a story about the pneumatic bottle capper that I had built to cap beer bottles. A short time later, I was contacted by WineMaker Magazine asking

Tropical fruit obviously are those native to the tropics. While the absolute number of fruit native to that area is disputed, at least 235 — more than twice that of the non-tropics

Late harvest wines are made using grapes affected by the mold Botrytis, which dehydrates the grapes. We’ve pooled advice from three pros with numerous accolades for their dessert wines to help you

There is lots of information out there about how to run various juice and wine analytical procedures at home if you want to do that. If you do not want to run

Grapevine Dormancy The beginning of the calendar year in my Hyde Park, New York home vineyard is when the vines are in dormancy. This is a period of time when the grapevine

Making kit wines doesn’t have to be only about following directions. Improve your wines by using tannin additions at various stages.

This past April 2014, over 50 experienced judges evaluated a total of 1,460 wine kit entries as part of the 2014 WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition. This large collection of kit entries

All done using their energy to grow shoots, grapes and leaves, vines in the winter begin storing water prior to the first frost and then go into dormancy. That doesn’t mean those