Writer: Tim Patterson

Barbera frequently comes in with high acidity but, with the right winemaking approach, it makes a food-friendly red for people who drink wine every day.

. . .lurking inside the heads of many home winemakers is the urge to make an absolute blockbuster, a jaw-dropping, mind-bending, 800-pound gorilla of a wine.

The mantra for the quest for making a big blockbuster type of wine is “more is better” — more sugar in the grapes, more alcohol in the wine, more extraction, more color

One of the things that makes wine irresistible is the endless variety: every grape, every region, every vintage, every bottle tastes a little different from the last. And so while there is

Today’s proposed violation takes on one of the dominant conventions of modern white winemaking: no skin contact.

Home Winemakers, Let’s Take a Vote: Those of you who put your wines through malolactic fermentation only after the alcoholic fermentation is complete, raise your hands. Now those of you who do

Pinot Grigio is everywhere, flooding every supermarket wine aisle and all over the wine lists at restaurants that don’t give much thought to their wine lists. It’s the single biggest (by volume)

The aromatic calculus for whites differs from that for reds, and aromatics in young wines are a world apart from the aromatics of well-aged wines. There are lots of places where you can do things in your home winery to amplify aroma, which are also the same places you can let them slip away.

In the 1960s, Viognier seemed to be an endangered grape, planted only in dwindling numbers in a pair of obscure redoubts in France, the shrinking Condrieu region and the one-winery Château-Grillet AOC.

From modern wine chemistry labs to your home winery — what is known about tannins and how can winemakers control their impact on their wine? Research is debunking many widely-held beliefs about

Home winemakers often resort to a little blending to improve their wines — to add a little more body, tweak the acid balance or deepen the color, or just because it takes

  Home winemakers often resort to a little blending to improve their wines — to add a little more body, tweak the acid balance or deepen the color, or just because it

What makes a wine age-worthy, and what can you do to create a wine worth cellaring.

Most books about home winemaking feature sections on “Making Red Wine” and “Making White Wine.” But when real, live vintners, amateur or professional, clean out their fermenters and get down to business,

German wines, particularly great German Rieslings, are unlike any other wines in the world, with unmatched fruit intensity, striking minerality and remarkable aging potential. Once you’re hooked, you’re hooked, and soon the

In her exhaustive survey of grapes and grapegrowing, Vines, Grapes and Wines, Jancis Robinson ends the chapter on Riesling with a summary that’s all-too-true: “Unbeatable quality; indisputably aristocratic. Ludicrously unfashionable.” Recognized by

 Syrah can do well in a wide variety of climates and produces wine in a number of styles, from drink-it-today fruity to structured and age-worthy. Syrah also blends well with Rhône varieties,

Home winemakers have an important new resource in the ongoing battle against spoilage organisms — it’s called lysozyme. Discovered in the 1920s and used for decades in the pharmaceutical, dairy and cheese

Blending different grape varieties to make a better finished wine is a bedrock practice in the commercial wine world — and one often overlooked by home winemakers. If they do it in