Recent content by winemakingscientist

I use this one: http://web2.airmail.net/sgross/fermcalc/fermcalc_applet.html

The "natural flavors" in the cranberry juice blend shouldn't hurt anything. If you look around here, you'll find people are making wine out of skittles and other kinds of candy, so it's not like food flavoring is going to cause major problems.

I'm glad it's going again, Lennie. Good luck, olusteebus. I bet that will work.

Sorry to hijack, K9, if you were asking the same thing. The wine will probably be fine. Taste it in six months. I'm always amazed at how wine that tastes weird at bottling can transform itself. I'm jealous of those vines :-)

I'm not sure I'm following. Did you crush, then ferment, then press and transfer to demijohns while the fermentation was still going a little bit? And then you left it for several months, in which time you got clear wine with a little bit of sediment at the bottom that tastes sharp and a bit...

This probably varies by person, but I wait a week or two after the bubbles are gone (ie no more tiny bubbles running up the sides) to let the gross lees settle and then rack. I don't check the SG until those gross lees are settled and I'm ready to rack, but I also usually wait until the SG is...

D47 does not like cool temps, so the heat was a good idea, but it might have been too late. D47 makes competitive factor K2, and 71B is killed by it. So when you added 71B, the yeasts were going into a hostile environment. EC1118 also makes competitive factor K2, so it shouldn't be killed by...

You're welcome. If you think of it, let us know how it goes.

Your air space looks fine to me. Red wine usually does need aging to be drinkable, so don't worry if it tastes bad now.

Fabiola is right that regular dry wine is pretty low in carbs to start out with. But if you buy a bottle you can't always tell from the label how dry it is, so what you're trying to do makes sense. If you make it yourself you'll know how dry it is. You want a yeast strain that will tolerate...

Many of the yeast manufacturers recommend freezing yeast so that it will last longer, so I wouldn't count on freezing killing wild yeast.

The wine in the 6 gal carboy will quickly turn into vinegar and be undrinkable. The bottled wine will presumably have sediment that settles out. If it's not very cloudy, it might be fine if you wait for the sediment to settle and pour it through a coffee filter. Another use for it might be to...

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I wonder if you would have gotten different results if you had pulled a vacuum on the sample rather than just shaking it. I used to work in a research lab, and we'd degas water by pulling a vacuum on it overnight. If you have water just sitting around exposed...

I googled and found reference to a "Sweet Shelly" grape. It is sometimes spelled with the extra "e". It is NY47616 (Bath x (Fredonia x Black Monukka). It looks like it's more of a table grape than a wine grape. But I've made plenty of wine from concord juice, and while it's not as good as...

Sorbate tastes a little sweet. I can tell the difference when I add it. K-meta at high levels supposedly tastes like a burnt match, but I use pretty low amounts and haven't tasted that. A medicine taste can be caused by a Brett infection. It tastes like band-aids smell -- like antiseptic. I...