Making Mistakes And Learning The Right Lessons
Posted in winemaking on May 10th, 2010
The excitement in homemade wine should come from how it tastes, not from realizing at the last minute that you overlooked something.
Category Archive for 'winemaking'
Wine Recipe Wizard
Posted in enology, winemaking on Jul 27th, 2009
Specify the volume, specific gravity, and titratable acidity of your juice. Then tell the wizard what you would like the specific gravity and titratable acidity of the must to be. It will recommend specific amounts of water, sugar syrup, and acid to make it happen.
Sweetening Wine: An example
Posted in winemaking on Dec 9th, 2008
The best way to sweeten wine, or mead, is: ferment to dryness, stabilize, then add boiled & cooled sugar syrup. Here’s an example.
Small Batches
Posted in winemaking on Nov 10th, 2008
There are some good reasons to make wine in 5-gallon (19 liter) or larger batches. Once you know what you’re doing, it takes about the same amount of effort to make five gallons of wine as it does to make one. The amount of headspace in a 5-gallon carboy isn’t much more than in a [...]
Tax Day Wine
Posted in winemaking on Apr 15th, 2008
Wine from Welch’s grape juice Its tax day in the US, and this year taxes made me busier and grumpier than normal. With all that behind me, I’m starting to feel like my old self. So when Welch’s concentrated grape juice went on sale the other day, I bought twelve cans to make a “Tax [...]
Oak Staves, Chips, and Powder – Free Samples!
Posted in winemaking on Apr 14th, 2008
I just received this very impressive sample kit from the Oak Solutions Group. There’s a lot to experiment with: different types of oak, in different forms, with different levels of toast. I hope to be trying it all out, and writing about it, over the next year. To get one for yourself, follow this link, [...]
Valentine’s Day Wine: Making your own
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 [...]
Acidity In Mead: Being rigorous with incomplete data
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 [...]
Five Meads: Are we there yet?
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 [...]
Titratable Acidity: A Better Way?
Posted in enology, equipment, measurement & testing, winemaking, winemaking clubs on Feb 5th, 2008
A man, his contraption, and a different way I learned of a different way to test for titratable acidity, the other day. At the last meeting of the Puget Sound Amatuer Wine and Beer Makers club, Don Proctor demonstrated this method using an odd looking device. He used ordinary baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to neutralize [...]