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Brettanomyces is often an ambient microbe in the air we breathe, but that’s no reason to go inviting concentrated and healthy stocks of it into your cellar.

I find that when sugar is that low, the process of re-starting actually lowers the overall quality and you’re better off bottling slightly sweet (sterile filtered).

Because sulfur dioxide is so easily-oxidizable, hydrogen peroxide naturally ‘finds’ the easily-oxidized SO₂ and the two hopefully cancel each other out.

If you add some kind of sweetener that is fermentable (table sugar, grape concentrate, maple syrup, honey, etc.) you risk an uncontrolled re-fermentation in the bottle, which is never fun.

Most top-scoring red wines made in the U.S. are bottled after 18–24 months in barrel.

Water softeners add another wrinkle, namely because they tend to add a lot of sodium.

A really innovative and completely natural way to control Japanese beetles is to implement a longer-term biological control program utilizing one of the insect’s natural enemies, the ‘milky spore’ bacteria.

Some home winemakers cool down must ferments by freezing gallon water jugs and tossing them (closed tightly) into fermenting totes, bins or trash cans of must during a punchdown.

Q Is there any wine grape that can be successfully grown in an area with a heat summation of 1,200? I am near the Pacific Coast and summers are not very warm,

I prefer to have as much information as I can about where my raw material is coming from, and being able to handle the actual grapes is one way to help you get there.

You could also try to take your lime wine and see what other kind of fun beverages you could make with it as a mixer . . .

Because of their chemical composition under wine pH (acidity) and fermentation conditions it’s quite possible these color compounds won’t stay red, or in solution, very long.

TCA, or the “corked” off-aroma, is caused by ambient molds interacting with a chlorine molecule of some kind, usually from domestic water supply.

Most closures are packaged pre-sanitized, usually with sulfur dioxide in the sealed bags that come from the manufacturer.

To maximize your chances of a successful in-the-bottle fermentation you need to prepare a starter culture.

I would argue that the rapidity with which the sugar is consumed (and the density is lowered) is almost as important as the level of sugar itself . . .

What you’re experiencing is the precipitation over time of all sorts of complex tannins and colored compounds.

In my experience, doing a traditional cold stability where you chill the wine down and then filter off any precipitation won’t shift the acidity enough to notice it in the taste.

Most folks I talk to say that sodium bentonite and calcium bentonite are interchangeable in winemaking.

Some of the SO₂ gas created by the sulfur wick certainly will transfer into the wine as sulfur dioxide.

It’s very possible this mold bloom was caused by a change in the weather or a change in your cellar environment.

It is entirely normal for the first soaking of a barrel to produce a dark-colored water.

Interestingly, a cork may smell “tainted” and the wine below it might be just fine, or, better said the wine in the bottle may be below your TCA threshold.

To quote one of my favorite UC-Davis professors, the newly-retired Dr. Linda Bisson, “No human pathogen can survive in wine.”

I actually prefer using a sock or some kind of bag rather than just having chips float loose on the surface.