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Wine Wizard

Is Potassium Sorbate In A Port Necessary?

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I’m with you. If I was making a Port-style wine and it was 20% alcohol and 100–150 g/L residual sugar (10–15%) I would forgo the potassium sorbate altogether. I am not a fan of potassium sorbate because I think it makes wines taste funny and seems to be a holdover from an earlier era when

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The Facts About Wine Headaches

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I’ve seen a few of these kinds of articles (ahem, I mean advertisements) floating around on the internet and it always results in an epic Wine Wizard “facepalm” upon reading. For starters,


Screwcap Closures

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Those are all great questions, let me see which order I’ll tackle them in. Firstly, we discuss corks for the most part on the pages of WineMaker Magazine not because they’re the only closure choice out there available to winemakers but because they’re simply the easiest closure for home winemakers, i.e. winemakers that typically bottle

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Sniffing The Cork

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You are more in the right here than your brother; when buying wine at a restaurant you really just smell and taste the wine. If the wine smells and tastes fine to


Yeast Pitching Rates

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Good for you for branching out. Apple cider has astronomically increased in popularity in the United States in the past few years and I see an increasing number of wineries trying their hand at the fermented-apple beverage. But back to the questions at hand. As to your wine kit coming with two packets of different

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Dealing With A Copper Problem

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That’s too bad that you added more copper sulfate than you intended to. Copper is an effective, legal, and ancient (the Romans knew about its curative powers in winemaking) tool for reducing (no pun intended) stinky rotten egg defects. Hydrogen sulfide is often the culprit and ionic copper, delivered in the form of copper sulfate

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Calculating Residual Sugar

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That’s certainly an interesting question and one for which the short answer is “no such equation exists.” The longer answer attempts to help explain why, even though you think you should have all the parts that you need to solve for unfermented sugar. As I was considering whether to answer your question for this issue

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Making White Zinfandel

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Funny you ask this question as I’ve just now got three tanks full of 2016 Monterey Pinot Noir rosé fermenting in the winery. White Zinfandel, contrary to what some folks think, is


Dealing With Volatile Acidity

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Not knowing any more information than you give above, it’s tough to make specific recommendations so I’ll start with the general ones. Whenever you suspect VA (volatile acidity, or the production of vinegar) in your wine, make sure you’re protecting against the most obvious enemies of newly-aging wine: Oxygen and spoilage microbes. The first thing

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Testing for MLF Completion

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In the old days we would use paper chromatography to monitor the completion of malolactic fermentation (MLF). We dotted little drips of the sample wine, along with liquid standards of malic and lactic acids, onto a piece of paper. When dry, we rolled up the paper and stuck it in a big mayonnaise jar full

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Red Wine Stabilization

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Ever open a bottle of red wine you’ve lovingly saved for 20 years only to be disappointed as a brick-orange liquid followed by a brownish sludge falls into your glass? The issue of color optimization and retention in red wines is a large and complicated one — I could probably write at least ten articles

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Evaporation Clarification

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Thanks for clarifying your question a little bit. I am glad to hear you regularly top off your barrels, it’s a practice all of us need to do. Alcohol and water definitely do evaporate out of barrels (along with small amounts of other volatile aroma constituents of wine) and the resulting headspace does need to

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Oak Barrel Seepage

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I’ve certainly had the odd leaker (or three) but I’ve never experienced trans-stave leakage of the scale that you describe. Before I delve any deeper, I first of all would like to say that your situation is unusual and one that warrants an immediate customer service call (read: complaint) to your barrel supplier. It is

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Allergic To Sulfites

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Certainly you can try to pasteurize (heat at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time) your wine if you like. Many foods and beverages (like milk) are so heat treated in order to kill any bacteria, yeast or other organisms. Louis Pasteur, the Frenchman who gave the process his name back in the

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Can Lysozyme Arrest MLF?

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In my day job in Napa, California (as Winemaker for Garnet Vineyards as well as other consulting projects) I bottle plenty of “partial ML” Chardonnay every year and love the style. In fact, my Garnet Vineyards Sonoma Coast Chardonnay is about two-thirds malolactic complete, depending on the natural acidity of the year (lower acid years

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Late Malolactic

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To shed light on your query, the Wine Wiz consulted the Winemaking Magic 8 Ball™ and the answer that floated to the top was, “Outlook not good.” If your 2010 Zinfandel still hasn’t gone through ML fermentation (where malic acid is consumed by lactic acid bacteria, turning it into lactic acid, softening the wine and

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Overspiced Wine Situation

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There’s nothing like a wine with what I call “the elbows sticking out” to ruin one’s mood. Especially frustrating is when one has followed a recipe or kit instructions to the letter only to find that the procedure has yielded less than satisfying results. Spices and other added flavorings in home winemaking are one of

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Soapy Taste In Wine

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Though tough to define as it can smell different to everyone, there is unfortunately no wine lab analysis panel you can run that says, “Yessir, you’ve got an over-abundance of Ivory Soap Flakes on your hands.” However, if you don’t like it in your wine, it’s a problem. Delving into the wine chemistry literature of

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Fining Fruit Wines

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The short answer is that yes, I would absolutely cut down on the amount of clarifying agent you use if you don’t have enough wine volume for the recommended 5 gallon (19 L) batch listed on the packet. Because I don’t know what is in your “pre-measured packet,” it’s hard for me to get into

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Perfecting Pyment

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Congrats for breaking out of the mold and taking it upon yourself to adapt a recipe to your own preferences! I always love it when readers, and my own winemaking buddies, take what they know or have done, and give it a good tweak. Pyment, or a fermented beverage made with both grape sugars and

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Making Dry Muscat

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Sounds tasty to me! I love a dry (or even off-dry, maybe with residual sugar of around 5 g/L), crisp Muscat wine. Historically, Muscats have been used in many wine types, from sweet and desserty to fortified to dry. I’ve made a few myself in my career, starting with the infamous “Vin de Glaciere” dessert

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Fun With Wine Filtration

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The fun of filtration! I’ll deliver the bad news to you and my readers first by telling you that really no matter how tight of a pore size you use to filter your wines, there is always the possibility of sediment developing over time. In fact, with red wines, it’s actually just about guaranteed. You

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Kombucha In My Winery?

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Just like I would not let a buddy of mine do any Brettanomyces beer-brewing experiments in my winery, so should you not do Kombucha and wine together in your kitchen (or garage) winery. Brettanomyces is a classic wine “spoilage” yeast responsible for a host of off aromas, often described as “barnyard” and “Band-Aid.” In addition,

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Stuck Fermentations

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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


“Fruit Floaties” — Strawberry Wine

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I just saw your picture and wow, that does indeed look like a floating brain — or two! Luckily, that is a great shot of what I would call typical “fruit floaties” combined with some of the fruit’s natural pectin, and I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. You see, when you make wine

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