Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in mead, measurement & testing on Feb 29th, 2008
I checked the titratable acidity (TA) of my cherry mead the other day, and something didn’t add up. Over six months, three measurements, and two acid additions (totaling 2.6 g/L) the TA fell from 6 to 5.5 g/L. The most obvious explanation is that I goofed up the titrations. As I added more acid, the [...]
Posted in apple wine, mead, measurement & testing, tomato wine on Feb 28th, 2008
Cherry Mead: The case of the disappearing acid Suppose you measure 6 g/L titratable acidity (TA), then add about 1.3 g/L of tartaric acid. After you let it sit for a while you’d expect a TA over 7, right? Me too. You certainly wouldn’t expect just a little over 5 (call it 5.2), would you? [...]
Posted in chocolate wine on Feb 25th, 2008
How to use chocolate in wine Should chocolate be the main ingredient in the wine? Put another way, should everything else in the wine be there just to make sure there is enough alcohol, sugar, and acid for the wine to be … well a wine? That’s how I made my oregano wine, and it [...]
Posted in peapod burgundy on Feb 20th, 2008
This blog is about making wine, so I don’t talk about my vegetable garden very much. My gardening and winemaking overlap in some ways like rhubarb wine, oregano wine, tomato wine, and the one-pint (500 ml) batch of wine from my own grapes. Well there’s going to be some more overlap this year, because I’m [...]
Posted in chocolate wine, ingredients on Feb 18th, 2008
From phenolics to butterfat, what winemakers need to know about chocolate.
Posted in ingredients, mead on Feb 14th, 2008
Acidity is as important to mead as it is to wine, but much more difficult to measure. Here’s how acid and lactone interact in honey, how that can fool conventional titration, and what you can do about it.
Posted in commercial wine, rhubarb wine, winemaking on Feb 13th, 2008
Most Rhubarb Wine recipes call for 3-5 lb of fruit – and a lot of water – for each gallon of wine. Commercial wineries aren’t allowed to add that much water, so how do they make rhubarb wine?
Posted in chocolate wine, valentine's day, winemaking on Feb 12th, 2008
A wine to match the occasion A couple of weeks ago, I passed along some great advice about pairing wine and chocolate for Valentine’s Day. That got me thinking about making a wine for the Day of Romance. What should the wine be like? At first, I thought it should pair with chocolate, like those [...]
Posted in enology, mead, measurement & testing, winemaking on Feb 8th, 2008
I talked about five of my meads yesterday, and how I might decide if they were ready to bottle. I looked at clarity and specific gravity (SG) because I didn’t want the mead throwing off sediment or fermenting in the bottle. I tasted, probably the most important test of any wine or mead, and I [...]
Posted in enology, mead, measurement & testing, storage and aging, tasting, winemaking on Feb 7th, 2008
I looked in on five meads yesterday to see if they were ready to bottle. I was looking for clarity, I tasted them to see if they were pleasant to drink, and I measured the specific gravity (SG), pH, and titratable acidity (TA). Name SG pH TA (g/L) 2004 Plain Mead 1.001 3.05 5 2005 [...]