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I only occasionally make kit wines and a couple of weeks ago I bought an inexpensive medium-bodied Pinot Noir kit from ABC Crafted Series located in Ontario. This was to make a nominal six gallon batch. I intended to add water to make a five gallon batch and after thoroughly mixing, I measured...

Just acquired a Pinot Noir kit that came with EC 1118. I have BM45; QA 23 and D47. Which yeast would you pick? Thanks

Given the sorbates used to help preserve bottled lemon juice I wonder if it may make any good sense to simply dissolve the sugar in water and add nutrients, and tannin and when at room temperature pitch the yeast. After a week or so, and so you will have a very large (and hopefully, very viable...

I want to try to grow some wild grapes. I assume that I have a better chance of successfully growing the grapes if I take some cuttings from the vines that grow near my home. My question: Is there a part of the vine that will more likely root than other parts? And is there a tried and tested...

Learned last night that I medaled in the New York State Fair Wine Competition: a silver for my dandelion and a bronze for my lemon wine. Woot , woot. Judging was held in June but the results were made public at the fair on Sunday.

Does anyone know of anyone who delivers a few lugs (say 72 - 108 lbs) of fresh (not frozen nor juice) grapes in the NE (upstate NY) Looking for Riesling or Gewurztraminer this fall. Thanks

Just got word that I won a silver for my t'ej (Ethiopian style mead) at Cellar Masters of LA. :db

The original recipe suggests a hefty 2 lbs of sugar to sweeten 5 gallons of SP. That's more than 6 oz of sugar per gallon and that would likely raise the FG to about 15 points should the SP finish at 1.000. All other things being equal, a wine with an FG of 1.015 is sweet. How sweet do you...

I am making two 5 gallon batches of SP and just racked them this morning and to my surprise I see that in one of the racked batches a dead fruit fly. How likely is it that one fly will carry enough aceto bacter to turn the whole batch to vinegar? I have no idea how long that fly was swimming in...

I am curious. What do folk on this forum do with all their used corks? Apart from making a cork board and perhaps floaters for wicks for oil fueled candles is there anything we can make from corks that would uptake them from being viewed as garbage? Thanks.

Does anyone know the definitive volume or weight of dandelion petals to make dandelion wine? Last year I made a decent dandelion mead using about 3 pints of petals to make 1 gallon. This year I have harvested (so far) about 3 lbs of petals (frozen). Do you think that that may be enough to make 3...

Someone mentioned about a week or so ago that in his copy of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine there was a recipe for this wine. In my edition of the book there is none. I wish I could remember who posted this but if you read this and you have your copy to hand could you perhaps copy and post the recipe...

Just because I could and I wanted to I started a gallon of wine from table grapes I purchased from my local supermarket. I had found about 4 recipes from a book published at the turn of the 20th Century written by a home wine maker of country wines and the author, Peggy Hutchinson, suggested...

I am making some Sangiovese wine from grapes and want to add oak cubes or spirals to the 6 gallons of wine I have (in 2 3 gallon carboys). Assuming I add about 1.5 oz of oak chips (or 1 spiral ) per carboy of Hungarian oak, how long should I allow the oak to sit in this wine - about a month...

I have just begun to make a first batch of wine using fresh grapes. I have made only a couple of kits (I make country wines and mead , not grape wines) and I wonder why kits don't include any instructions for malolactic fermentation. More to the point: why don't kits acknowledge MLF? Is it...

Apart from using chromatography to check to see if any malic acid remains is there any other simple method of determining that it has ended? Do labs offer some guide that if you use their bacteria you can expect fermentation to end after X weeks? Or are we left simply looking for the presence of...

Clearly it is vital to punch down the cap that forms several times a day but what do you do if you need to be away for three or four days and there is no one else who can take over that task? Does it make any sense to strain the fruit and then store it in a fridge (or freezer) and then to...

Just obtained 72 lbs of Sangiovese grapes from my LHBS and I used an old milk crate to destem and crush them but I don't know how well the grapes were "crushed". My sense is that "crushing" means that the vast, vast majority of the grapes are now in the fermenter with their skins split or...

I am planning to make my first batch of grape wine from whole grapes in a few weeks and am thinking about MLF. My batch size is likely to be about 6 gallons so I don't need a pack of bacteria that will make 60 gallons. WLP675 seems to be made for a wine maker like me... but is this a reasonably...

First time making a wine from some Sangiovese grapes my LHBS is getting in shortly. Expecting to obtain enough grapes to make about 5- 6 gallons ( two crates) What is the preferred yeast for this wine?