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I'm only a few years into my wine making journey and some things you learn from tasting, and waiting, and tasting, and waiting some more, and ... yeah you get where I'm going. With that introduction; what country wines (fruit/berries/flowers/vegetables) are best to drink early and which ones...

I read somewhere (can't remember the source) that, when adding potassium sorbate as a stabilizing agent, a geranium odor eventually will appear. There was no "if" - just a matter of time before it happens. For those of you who have experience using potassium sorbate, is this statement true? If...

I have a blueberry wine that may have been infected by mycoderma / flowers of wine. I always start a slightly larger (more voluminous) must than the target final volume (which equals the volume of a carboy). That way I have extra wine for topping up after rackings. I usually store excess wine...

How do you like your dandelion wine with regards to ABV and sweetness (bottled SG)? Also, when making the must, my experience is that petals give off different flavors when treated with hot water compared to cold/room temperature water. In the poll, select one option from each of the three...

I wanted to calculate the concentration of sugar in my recently bottled wild strawberry wine. Not the back sweetened amount - the total amount of sugar per liter. I did some searching and found several sites displaying tables with SG's for different percentages of ethanol in water (by weight)...

Hello, good people! I've been making (fruit) wine for a couple of years and decided to make my own labels. I got to it; designed a label, printed it out (on regular printing paper) and was disappointed. The print just looks super dull and wrongly colored compared to the screen image. The label...

Picked 10,5 kg (23 pounds) of wild blueberries this summer and tossed them in the freezer. Decided to go with 800 g berries per liter (6,7 pounds per gallon) to make a flavorful wine. I know that low pH may pose a challenge when making wine with blueberries. I'm pretty new in this game and don't...

Is there a way to accomplish "pretty" corking with a hand corker? The corker often breaks off small pieces of the top part of the cork (which looks terrible), or corks don't go in all the way (which also looks terrible). To some degree or another, all corks have the signature "hand corker dent"...

I was recently advised to try out gelatin for removing bitter tannins from a wild strawberry wine. It also needed clearing, so I went ahead. Only a third of the gelatin in the sachet would be used for this purpose, so I decided to try it out on my forest berry wine (wild varieties of...

Last year I started a wild strawberry wine which I'll be bottling within the next couple of months. Although aging has improved it quite a bit, it's still more bitter than I'd like it to be. The offender I hear are the seeds. I'll make the same wine this year but want the must to be close to...

I have 23 liters (6 gallons) of a port style rose hip wine which is about 19 % ABV. Some months ago I measured the SG to 1.012. It was the same about a week ago. I sampled it, decided to back sweeten and added 230 g of sugar (10 g/l). I measured the SG today and it hasn't moved (I've seen no...

Actually the thread should be named something like; Addition of acid in wines which flavor contributing ingredients contain no or a negligible amount of acids ... but then no one would click 🙃 Of course, I'm talking about wines that have no "natural" source of acid (for example flower wines...

We've come to the time when there are flowers blooming everywhere. Some times I pass a flower, smell it and wonder if it would make a good (or great) wine. As far as threads go I see a lot of discussion about dandelion and elderflower, and to some extent hibiscus and lilac, but there are so...

Surely a no-no but can it be done (safely)? Let's say I have a wine which is a full year old and has been racked several times. It's totally clear with no visible lees. I back-sweeten and take a hydrometer reading after sugar's been dissolved. After a couple of months I take another reading -...

Last summer, I picked wild strawberries like my life depended on it. By the end of summer I had 5.25 kgs (11.6 lbs). I ended up using 3.6 kgs (7.9 lbs) in an all wild strawberry wine which was started early August (the rest was used in a forest berry wine with wild blueberries and raspberries)...

Making blackberry wine was not in my plans for the summer/fall, but I happened to discover a very vital thorny "bush" (it's kind of monsterous) in my neighborhood. I've been picking it somewhat regularly since late august and now have just over 4 kgs (9+ pounds). I plan on using 600 g/liter (~5...

So I've worked quite hard this summer picking wild strawberries to make a super delicious wine (hopefully). Two days ago I took 3.6 kg of berries out of the freezer, put them in a fermenting bucket, added tartaric acid, sulfite and some water, before adding pectic enzyme half a day later. All...

As you can tell from the heading I want to get your advice on two completely different topics. Firstly, I want to know how you manage "free" sulfite concentrations in your wines. I know there's a sulfite testing kit called "Titrets", which I have understood can be unreliable. I wonder if...

Okay. So I'm planning to make a weird wine out of root vegetables, tomato and lemon. The ingredients aren't really the point here. Let me explain ... Usually I toss in all ingredients, add yeast, and let the process run its course. With this recipe I want the fermentation to run with root...

So I'm one of those noobs in need of guidance. Thank you Wine Making Talk. I'm currently making my first wine. Actually, my first three wines (I decided to just go all in): An apple/rowan berry white/rose I started late September on Mangrove Jack’s MA33 yeast. Estimated 11 % abv. A red...