Search results

My Mexican Plum wine had a dreaded yellow goo. by the time I had chapitalized it up to 17 percent and filtered it before bottling it all came out. Got a silver medal from Winemaker's Magazine. Do not dread the goo.

I made a batch of tea wine using Lapsong Souchong and brown sugar. Used a little cane and malt syrup to back sweeten at bottling, and came up with a very different wine that half of my friends loved and half hated. My son said it tasted "like barbecue sauce and FUN". Go for it, and tell us...

When buying honey, be sure it really is honey. Anything imported from outside the US is honey flavored CORN SYRUP and can legally be labeled as honey. Call up the business and ask where their hives are. The taste and texture are completely different.

I have enough canned blackberries to make a 6 gallon batch. I also have a merlot kit and a castel del pape kit that haven't been started. who has an opinion on whether to use the blackberries to back sweeten the kit, or ferment the blackberries and use the grape concentrate to back sweeten...

I recently racked and tasted both the "super Tuscan blend" and the Barbarra and they will be respectable. Not great, certainly, but not a waste of sugar and concentrate. I think the Tuscan style could benefit from a bit of oak. Not in any hurry. Since I started with twice the skins the recipe...

That vintage prune and raisin recipe looks tasty to me, too. I am alergic to oranges and lemons, Ithink I could substitute tamarind for the lemon, but what could I substitute for the orange? Mango, maybe? Would crystal malt be less likely to make a haze than the wheat? Inquiring minds want...

Thanks for the opinions. There are always folks on this forum that have already done what ever I am thinking of trying. I tasted it andthe texturewas a little thin and weak on taste. I added the red grape concentrate to the 6 gal. must bucket, and siphoned both of the three-gallon carboys...

I am looking for a second opinion or two. I have 6 gallons of skins and seeds from two or more batches of fresh grapes. I wanted to make a batch of "false wine" or second wine, so I brought home the pressings from someone elses batch. The recipes call for replacing the pressed off juice with an...

Don't be afraid of starting with fruit wine from scratch, especially if the fruit is free. Man discovered thousands of years ago that fruit or juice left alone will often ferment with out help. Read lots of recipes and compare/contrast them to see what their structure is. Get a book to read...

Also, try this recipe book: http://www.finevinewines.com/p-548-7360.aspx. I made recipe 59 twice using different fruits. My favorite was mango fruit that I sweetened at the end with white grape concentrate, then added juice from granny smith apples for acid balance. You could substitute whatever...

For safety, you can follow the instructions on the canning jars for sterilizing them first. It should list how long to boil them. Rather than boil mine, I usually put them in a dishwasher and run through a full wash-rinse-dry with soap in the wash cycle, to clean and sanitize them before using...

the little 187 champagne bottles take a standard crown cap. Are the regular bottles too big?

I got paper from George and printed up my own, but the colors bled and ran when they got damp from putting them on. Is that the difference between ink jet and laser jet? The ones I have George print up get wet when I put them on, and don't run or spot. Do all ink jet inks run, and do all the...

I haven't done any grape wine from scratch, but several other fruits. Wouldn't lots of tannin be a good thing? The way you "get rid of" them is to age the wine. I did a wild plum port style several years in a row, and the first two years the tannins had quite a bite. By the third year, it was...

I was given more than eight one-gallon glass bottles with screw on caps (from commercial wine) that I would like to trade for something. Any one have anything to trade? Maybe 375 or 187 or ice wine bottles or Buon Vino Automatic Auto Bottle Gravity Filler? Make me an offer!</span>

Only problem with using jelly, is getting enough pectinase to break down all the pectin added to it to get it to jell. I used some prickly pear jelly to counter the addition of too much lemon juice, and bring the acidity back down.

How many cups or pounds of skins per gallon would one want to use for second run wine? Would second run wine work with white grape skins? Normally, white wine isn't fermented on the skins. How long would you leave the white skins in, before pressing them out?

So just what is methylated spirit, and where do I get it? I am still waiting, but no further clearing or compacting.

I agree with the by the glass. Artificial sweeteners cause tummy problems for most people, and most of us can taste the off flavor. Why ruin the flavor of something you worked so hard on?

What would be the motive?