Techniques

Start with the grapes. Whether you make wine at home from fresh grapes, juice, or frozen must, there are many influences over the quality and character of your wine. Grape variety itself

In the life of the amateur winemaker, there may come a time when the idea of starting a commercial winery pops up. Making wine can be a gratifying and engaging career, so

If you are of the opinion that yeast selection does not matter and that the only role of yeast is to convert sugar into ethyl alcohol (ethanol), you may have been missing

Pinot Grigio is everywhere, flooding every supermarket wine aisle and all over the wine lists at restaurants that don’t give much thought to their wine lists. It’s the single biggest (by volume)

There is no better way to get to know a wine region than paying a visit and chatting up the winery management and their staff. It is then that you can learn

To make good wine one must understand what good wine is and, alternatively, understand and be able to detect wine faults. Anyone can learn to evaluate wine, and as a winemaker it

“Blending is a natural procedure, honest, necessary, and in accordance with historical events.” With that quote, eminent wine authority Emile Peynaud gives us permission to play with our wines. While he was

The aromatic calculus for whites differs from that for reds, and aromatics in young wines are a world apart from the aromatics of well-aged wines. There are lots of places where you can do things in your home winery to amplify aroma, which are also the same places you can let them slip away.

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 practices with a longstanding tradition before the scientific knowledge caught up, the field of wine and winemaking has its share of myths, misconceptions, and sheer quackery.

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 display the purity of the fruit the way that Mother Nature intended.

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.