Search results

Here in South East England we've had so much rain this winter plus a bit of snow. Then this week the rain stopped and we've now got a mini heat wave at 28C / 82F today! The vine buds are now looking like their about to burst, whereas 4 days ago there was no sign of life. I'm growing Regent (nice...

My two bits of advice are that 1) potassium sorbate will stop the yeast from reproducing, so effectively stop fermentation. 2) storage of a grape wine below 5C will encourage potassium tartrate to precipitate out and form crystals which enables you to rack the wine off leaving the crystals...

Hi, yes the Brix reading from a refractometer will be distorted by the effect that alcohol has on the refractive index. The actual alcohol content can be determined if you take a reading from your refractometer and a hydrometer at the same time. There's no need to measure the specific gravity at...

Hi, It's a shame that hackers have made all of us nervous about downloading from the internet. I get a similar message when I download my own program, but of course I feel safe in over riding the warning message. I know you don't know me from Adam, so understand your caution. That's the way of...

The Home Wine Program is available for free from homewineprogram.com. It can be used to keep notes about each batch of wine and output graphs showing progress. It can also be used to design recipes for country wines with up to 11 ingredients in each from a choice of over 90. There is also the...

@BernardSmith

Hi, I've recently returned to winemaking and brewing having now retired. My main interest is in producing wines from fruits such as apples, blackberries, elderberries etc in an effort to emulate commercial grape wines. I also grow grapes on an allotment. Cheers, Peter Gaulton

Another way of measuring alcohol content is to measure the final SG and also take a reading from a sugar refractometer (usually available for around $30). It uses the fact that the refractive index of a liquid is influenced by the amount of sugar and alcohol present. The method was developed by...

The body of a wine can be predicted if you know the level of unfermentable soluble solids in each ingredient. For example, a medium bodied wine will have around 2.5% soluble solids. Gerry Fowles handbook "Must" gives some values for commonly used ingredients, or if you want to let a Windows pc...