Wine Wizard

Blending is fine; but if you don’t have enough suitable wine to lower the alcohol to a point you like, make it into a dessert wine. When faced with a 17 percenty

My condolences on experiencing your first visitation by the ever present, but never welcome, Drosophila melanogaster — more commonly known as the common fruit fly. These prolific and pesky little airborne bugs

To filter or not to filter, that is the question. For the home winemaker it often is less a question of quality than a question of cash flow or wanting to be

Wine Wizard replies: If you’re looking for a way to boost acid without adding extra sugar, stick to acid blend. Using grape-juice concentrate as an additional fermenting agent in fruit wines, on

The ancient science of identifying grapevines by their physical characteristics is called ampelography and, you’ll be happy to know, it is a relatively well-documented field. As you can imagine, in the days

More experienced winemakers than yourself have spent eons trying to ponder the conundrum of a stuck fermentation. If you wanted the wine to be dry and it ended up sweet, it means

Ah yes, the beloved fluted tops. I’ve heard many justifications for them from various folks, usually that the tops help you to pour the wine without dripping down the side of the

The Wine Wizard replies: It’s illegal for commercial winemakers to add anything non-Vitis vinifera to their table wine and still have it be labeled as such. However, I’m sure that many an

Dear Wine Wizard, I desperately need to know how to cool my primary. I use two 50-gallon barrels to ferment my wine and am tired of using frozen one-gallon plastic jugs. There

Wine Wizard replies: It is impossible to make a sulfite-free wine, because wine yeast produce sulfur dioxide (SO2) during the fermentation process. Wines with no added sulfite contain from 6 to 40

Dear Wine Wizard, I have been making mead for a few years. I love the clover and honey accents in it. Most people who have tried it like the taste, but they

The Wine Wizard replies: In the home winemaking world there is quite a bit of debate on how to treat corks before they’re fed into the hand corker and forced down the

Unless you artificially carbonate your still wines by kegging them, there is only one possible source of carbon dioxide in wines — microbes, specifically little bacteria and yeastie beasties that love to

Dear Wine Wizard, Here’s one problem you may have been asked about before. My finished wine has an aroma and taste of rubber and burnt toast, a bit like burnt rubber. Since

Your question is a valid one — one that many winemakers before you have wondered about. As you have discovered, where you take a sample from in a tank can give you

Wine Wizard replies: First of all, you need to make sure that the fermentation is finished. You do this by checking your sugars with a hyrdrometer. Fermentation for a “dry” wine is

Dear Wine Wizard, I raised the TA of the must from 0.5 to 0.6 at the beginning of fermentation for my red wine. Should I still add malolatic bacteria to start MLF

You’ve hit the nail on he head — a hydrometer reading does depend on the amount of suspended solids in the juice that you’re measuring. As sugar is more dense than water,

Dear Wine Wizard, I’m bottling some mead, and wanted to add that extra special touch to the finished product. I’ve seen some bottles with a wax coating on the top, the kind

You all seem to have the same problem, so I thought I’d answer you all together. Acid adjustment, or better, achieving the right acid balance, is one of the arts of winemaking.

Hold on there, tiger! If you’ve got a standard 0.44 gram Campden tablet and you’re putting it in one gallon (3.8 L) of wine, you’re blasting it with 66 mg/L sulfur dioxide,

Dear Wine Wizard, I’m new to wine making but I have made beer and mead for three years. What types of grapes and yeast are used to make lambrusco wine? Also the

Dear Wine Wizard, After I stabilized my wine, I added French medium toast oak beans to the Chardonnay 3/4 cup (new beans), Sauvignon Blanc 1/3 cup (new beans), Ruisseau Blanc 3/4 cup

Wine Wizard replies: Your question is complex. In fact, it could lead to pages upon pages of response if I elucidated upon “all those chemicals” (and many of them are not really

Wine Wizard replies: If you’ve seen a lot of home winemaking recipes that recommend pounds upon pounds of refined sugar, it’s because refined sugar is the cheapest agent available to home winemakers