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It's been fermenting nicely for 5 days, SG is down to 1.010, and the color is getting darker. Up to now the lid on my primary has been set loosely on, so today I sealed the lid and airlocked itfor it to finish dry. Should I continue punching the cap down (which requires the primary to be opened...

I got back from my business trip, warmed the must back up, and pitched the yeast. Fermentation is progressing normally, so the 5-day cold soak successfully saved it until I got back and didn't seem to hurt anything. Thanks again for the excellent advice!

Thanks guys - I was hoping you'd come to my rescue! Yes, I have an old fridge in the winery (I mean garage!) with an external thermostat that keeps it at whatever temp I set it to (usually 68F). Use it all the time for summer winemaking and it works great. So it sounds like I can safelygo with...

Now that I'm comfortable with kits I thought I'd try a small batch from fresh grapes. I'll be picking them up next Saturday (50 lbs of local Zinfandel) but have to go out of town that week and no one will be around to monitor the fermentation or punch the cap down. So my best options seem to be...

Carboys are not supposed to be precision laboratory-grade vessels. 3 gallons is 48 cups, so if your carboy is 2 cups low then you're off by 4%. Most kits allow that they might be topped up with water post-fermentation, and if you're good at racking you can probably get by with only 1 bottle's...

I've filtered without cold stabilizing and still had some tartrates fall out so I don't think filtering will remove much (if any). But filtering after cold stabilization will keep you from bottling even the smallest of crystals. I haven't noticed any dissolving back into the wine after only 1...

I cold stabilize both reds and whites. But I've only had significant amounts of tartrates (as much as 1/4 cup) drop out of high-end 23L kits (Meglioli's in particular) so now I only cold stabilize those. I attribute that to the high juice quality.

Here's another possibility. I also noticed that my wines get better after being opened a day or two, but in my case it turned out to be due to insufficient degassing prior to bottling. I use the Vacuvin stopper on opened wines, which after a day will pull out the excess gas. You can also do a...

I didn't trust my pallete the first time I backsweetened a Riesling and didn't want to over- or under-sweeten it, so I took an SG reading of a commercial Riesling we like. After slowly backsweetening 1 bottle and getting it to whereweliked, I checked its SG and compared the two. This gave me a...

Why wait 3 months after backsweetening before bottling?(I usually wait 2 weeks just to make sure there's no renewed fermentation.)

I've seen their advertisements and wondered, too.Does anybody know how these productscompare to higher-end kits like an AllJuice or Meglioli?

I knew it was OK after the second racking (just after fermentation completes to get the wine off all that yeast), but I wasn't sure about between the first and second racking (which is when MM has you use the oak they provide) because that's also when the lees contain the most yeast. But it...

That's plenty of margin so next time I'll just wait till 1.02 and then leave it on the oak for at least 7 days after that (even if fermentation is done)before racking. Thanks (as always!)

I'm refering to the oak chips that come with MM AllJuices intended to get fully extracted in the 6-7 days it generally takes between racking to glass and the end of secondary fermentation. It would just be alot easier to leave in a few extra days. How long can a wine that's just completed...

I also don't trust them when full, but carboys get slippery when cleaning with EasyClean and the handles don't. Much less chance of it crashing into the sink.

The instructions say to add the oak to a carboy and rack at 1.050-1.040, then rack again when fermentation finishes 6-7 days later. I know to go by SG and not time, but waiting to rack until 1.02 doesn't leave it on oak that many days before fermentation is done. Waiting 6-7 days after the 1.02...

I actually asked George about that a while back and he said that Mosti thinks racking at 1.040 infuses some oxygen just when the yeast need it to help prevent a stuck fermentation. But so far all of my fermentations (WE and MM, 6 kits total) have been healthy and completed to dry so waiting...

After 2 AllJuices that volcanoed when racking at 1.050-1.040 (the first because I didn't know any better, the second happened even though I was trying to be careful), for my third AllJuice I racked 3/4 gallon to a 1 gallon jug and the rest to the carboy. That left plenty of room for both to...

My wines were well degassed and clear prior to filtering, and I've not had any sediment fall out post-filtering (other than wine diamonds on 23L non-cold-stabilized wines). Guess I should have been more explicit - I meant to ask if waiting between filtering and bottling affected the taste vs...

So is waiting a few days between filtering and bottling necessary or not? I use my MiniJet to filter from carboy to primary and then immediately bottle, but now I'm wondering if I've been doing it right.