Month: November 2013

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How to Chaptalize Wine

Chaptalizing is the act of adding sugar to a grape must in order to increase the alcohol content of the finished wine. Since yeast consumes sugars to produce alcohol, if you add sugar to grape juice before or during fermentation the yeast will have more sugar to convert thus yielding higher alcohol levels.

This process is widely regulated in commercial wine making depending upon where in the world you are located. The US has federal regulations (available here) and some states enact their own regulations to go on top of the federal ones. Continue reading “How to Chaptalize Wine”

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My Bottled Wine is Cloudy – Now What?

Bottling is the final step in the wine production process. If your wine going to look good in the glass it needs to look good when it goes into the bottle. Once it’s in the bottle it’s hard to clear up any issues.

Recently Tom wrote in  with the following situation:
We bottled 2 days ago and the wine is cloudy, you can see by holding the bottle up near a light bulb. My question is can I still clear the wine? I mean can I put the wine back into a carboy and use another clearing agent or something like that or am I stuck with the wine as it is? Continue reading “My Bottled Wine is Cloudy – Now What?”

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How to Know When to Rack your Wine

There’s a lot of different information out there on when to rack your wine. Largely this is because you rack at different times for different reasons depending upon where you are in the wine making process.

Knowing when to rack wine will help you make a better bottle of wine.The three main times when you rack a wine are:

1. When moving your wine from the primary fermenter to the secondary.
2. When moving your wine from the secondary fermenter to a bulk aging vessel.
3. After fermentation you can rack either for clarity or in and out of oak vessels.

Let’s take a look at why and when you rack wines during these different phases. Continue reading “How to Know When to Rack your Wine”

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Making Wine from Grapes vs Kits

Wine kits are a great place to start when learning to make wine. They’re inexpensive, pre-stabilized, and come with a great set of instructions to help you through the process. You also need only a minimal amount of equipment.

At some point though we all want to graduate kit wine making to making wine from fresh grapes.

There are a few things that differ between the two methods of making wine. The most obvious is the equipment required to process the fruit. You’ll likely need a crusher / destemmer as well as a grape press, all of which are used to extract the juice from the fruit.Wine grapes prepped for pressing.

The other differences are on a deeper level and this is where I’d like to dive in and explore what the big differences are. Continue reading “Making Wine from Grapes vs Kits”