Writer: Alison Crowe

The “red wine headache” is one of those wine questions that lies somewhere between legend and reality. However, there are some real answers. I’ll lay them out and you can decide for

If you use a 1-5 gallon (3.8–19 L) yeast packet for 1 gallon as opposed to 5 gallons, it is likely that your fermentation will proceed faster, have a more yeasty aroma

Wine Wizard answers: Synthetic corks are becoming more and more popular as commercial and home winemakers alike seek to avoid the 5 to 15 percent of bottles that can be ruined due

I firmly believe that — much like Sauternes and foie gras, Port and blue cheese — oak chips and cheese cloth were always destined for each other. Many winemakers, from purveyors of

My, my, my! I sincerely hope you are joking about that lawsuit — first, because I certainly hope you are under no impending financial harm, but also because I’d assume no home

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

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

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

In the early days of the California wine industry, growers found that Zinfandel was a good “workhorse” grape that did well in a variety of climates and that could, under hot and dry conditions, be forced to accrue a high concentration of sugar.

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

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

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,

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,

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

The solera system of wine aging was developed by the Spanish and Portuguese as a way to provide wines of a constant average age, as well as to ensure a certain homogeneity

Brettanomyces is a particularly nasty yeast that is often the bane of the collective existence of many winemakers. Its foul-smelling byproducts have often been called “barnyardy” or “mouse pee-like” on the sensory