Topic: Aging

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.

For many wine lovers, the subject of a wine’s aging potential can be intimidating or seem like artful science that is best left to the wine gurus of the world. Some are

You can absolutely adjust acidity in a wine when it is one year old. Though I often say that it’s best to do major adjustments early on in a wine’s life (since

If you have the freezer space I say freeze, freeze away! It’s actually somewhat common (for those grape producers who specialize in it like Brehm Vineyards, Vino Superiore, or Wine Grapes Direct)

Home winemakers tend to ferment in glass carboys (big 5-gallon/19-L jars, essentially) because they are usually better-sized and more convenient to a home hobbyist than larger vessels like a 59-gallon (223-L) barrel.

What does “topping up” mean and when should it be done?

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.

Wine is a dynamic chemical soup, constantly changing, evolving, reducing and oxidizing. From the moment it is made, its fate is sealed. Yes, it will improve, mature, reach a peak, and then

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

Here are some tips and suggestions on cellaring your homemade wine and maintaining the cellar itself. The cellar “The cellar” has a wide range of interpretations for home winemakers. If you have

There is more to cellaring bulk wine than meets the eye. Throughout the aging process, the winemaker is on a tightrope walk between intervening to prevent and correct problems while remaining relaxed enough to let good wine evolve naturally.

A home winemaker offers tips on how to keep your wine cellar stocked with a variety of wines.

If you’ve done everything right in the winery and your wine tastes great going into the bottle, you might scratch your head when you open that first bottle to find your wine muted and disjointed. Fear not — your wine is likely experiencing bottle shock.

A common perception about wine is that red wines should always be aged and white wines are intended to be consumed young. I won’t call this a total misconception — it is

I applaud you for your patience in aging your bottled wines that long! Would you be surprised to know that in the US most bottles of wine are consumed within 72 hours

Learn the basics of how and where to age your homemade wines.

In the final installment of our year-long series, the wines are bulk aged, oaked, and bottled.

It starts with great fruit, but to make age-worthy red wine the winemaker must also consider acidity, tannins, sulfur dioxide, oxygen, cellaring conditions, and how all of these factors (and others) relate to each other.

In this article I’ll be discussing “vinfanticide,” which is wines to drink on bottling day (or before). And in the next issue I’ll cover super-early drinking wines (under three months of age).

So sorry to hear you had a bad year with the powdery mildew. Many growers in California were challenged by 2011, as the cooler weather left lots of us battling botrytis, rot

I am making wine from my own grapes in Alpine, California and have noticed that occasionally a light film forms on the inside of some bottles. I am very meticulous about keeping

Argon gas My carboys are 6 1⁄4 gallons (24 L). I am making mostly heavy reds and want to bulk age in glass carboys for up to twelve months before bottling. I

I can guarantee the contents of the bottles are completely useless for any winemaking application. It’s almost unheard of for a wine, let alone much more-perishable grape juice, to survive in any

What makes a wine age-worthy, and what can you do to create a wine worth cellaring.

It’s hard to say “what went wrong” in this situation as the life of every wine is a fog of carefully guarded secrets that even my scrying glass can’t penetrate. However, the