Topic: Troubleshooting

As I walked about the roomful of wine following April’s WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition judging, I was reminded of how little thought is given to closures. Winemaking problems notwithstanding, this could

Did you ever create a wine that seemed more viscous than your typical wine, or which may have exhibited heavier fruity odors, or perhaps a solvent-like smell? The culprits may well be

Unfortunately, there are hundreds of possible causes of stuck and sluggish fermentations, and sometimes, even after careful investigation, we still can never understand what the cause may have been. With Mother Nature

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.

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

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.

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.

Grape growing questions answered!

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

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

The early signs of oxidation are orange to brown colors developing in your wine. In white wine, the same exact wine (pictured above) can go from white (left) to brown (right) if

Very, very interesting. I have to say that the zest of 21 limes for three gallons (11 L) of liquid seems like a lot of lime-y-ness to me! I can only imagine

Oxidation gets a lot of attention in winemaking — and it should! WineMaker magazine has covered oxidation issues from several different angles over the past few years. While some presence of oxygen

Would you be surprised to know that you may be doing absolutely nothing wrong? Even though you tried to sanitize your corks (assuming you are using natural corks and not artificial corks)

All home winemakers wish — and strive — for fermentations that go smoothly and completely to the desired finish, usually dry wine. When things go wrong, a frequent problem is a stuck

If you’ve ever tasted a wine that had a funky “barnyard” quality to it, you already know what Brettanomyces can do. Find out how to prevent it in your home winery.

Brettanomyces has been known to take hold of wines —and entire wineries — destroying countless hours of hard work that was put into creating these wines. However, there are also regions in

If you have ever encountered volatile sulfur compounds in wine, of which hydrogen sulfide is the most common, you know how repulsive the smell can be. Learn the causes and solutions.

When the editors at WineMaker suggested quality control (QC) for a story, I was delighted to take it on. I have a long personal and professional history with QC and it infuses

In a notebook of fermentation hobby records, I have a lab report dated November 3, 1998. That soil pre-plant analysis from Fruit Growers Laboratory marked my start 20 years ago in becoming

Your question about how to avoid a swampy, reductive odor in your Chardonnay after bottling is an interesting one. For readers who may not be aware, “reductive” is a non-exact sensory term

Oxygen’s presence or absence at the various stages of winemaking can have extraordinarily important and lasting effects on what our wines taste like. Too much and you risk oxidation damage, too little and you risk reduction stink. The effects of oxygen on wine, much more so with red wines, may be the most complex and least understood part of the winemaking process.

It’s said that people eat and drink with their eyes, and when it comes to wine there is no exception.Find out how to create and protect the color of your red, white, and pink wines.

Let me put on my thinking cap. Indeed I think you are facing a re-fermentation and I’d bet that it is due to your 1% residual sugar, but perhaps secondarily to a

Before we finish shooting smelly troubles in wine kits we need to do a quick recap of the basics of troubleshooting: Almost all of these issues can be avoided if you carefully