Category: Wine Making Process

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Stabilizing Wine for Back Sweetening – WMA016

Stabilizing Wine for Back Sweetening

Back sweetening can be a tricky process. If the yeast is not either removed or incapacitated in some way they will happily ferment any sugars you add to your wine to back sweeten it. So how do you stabilize a wine so that you can sweeten a wine without risking fermentation, or worse, exploding bottles?

Sweet Wine
“Wine legs” indicating residual sugar left in this finished wine.

That is the main topics for this episode of the Winemaker’s Academy Podcast. During the show I explore the three main ways of stabilizing a wine so you can add sugars and end up with a sweet wine instead of a fermenting wine.

Listener & Reader Questions

Continue reading “Stabilizing Wine for Back Sweetening – WMA016”

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Interview with Winemaker Jason Phelps – WMA014

The best way to improve upon a skill, winemaking included, is through personal experience. The second best way is by learning through others experiences. In this episode I’ve got a great interview with winemaker Jason Phelps where he shares many lessons learned through his ten years of wine making experience.

Jason Phelps of Ancient Fire Wine.
Jason Phelps

You’ll hear about wines that went well and won medals, wines that didn’t go so well and had to be poured out, and what he learned by competing and judging winemaking competitions.

So grab a notebook and a glass of wine for this episode. You’ll learn a lot but you’ll also be challenged to consider how you view your wine and how you make it. I know I came away from this interview needing to reflect on some of my own views and reconsider what direction to take my own wines.

Listener Questions

Jason was kind enough to weigh in on several questions that came in from members of the Winemaker’s Academy Facebook group (email me for more information on that).

  1. How would you go about doing wine making bench trials?
  2. How do you recommend making wine without sulfites?
  3. Do you have any methods for reducing sulfur smells in a finished wine?
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How Long Do Primary and Secondary Fermentations Last?

Nearly every wine kit and wine making recipe has a different recommendation on how long primary and secondary fermentations are supposed to last. It turns out that there are a lot of variables that can affect how long each of these last. This means that there’s a good chance your wine will behave differently than what the instructions or recipe you’re following say should happen.

Primary fermentation is the more vigorous portion of the fermentation process during which time approximately 70% of your total amount of alcohol is produced. It will generally go by much more quickly than secondary fermentation. For more information on the differences between these two check out Primary Vs Secondary Fermentation.

So how long should each of these take? Continue reading “How Long Do Primary and Secondary Fermentations Last?”

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Bottling Wine at a Small Winery

Recently I volunteered at two different Colorado wineries to give them a hand bottling wine. It was a great experience and one that I learned a lot from.

While I did expect the two different wineries to have different bottling procedures I was struck by just how different they were. On the one hand was a simple, no frills bottling process much like any amateur wine maker does on their own. On the other hand was a more complex process that required some specialized equipment.

Here is a synopsis of each bottling process. Continue reading “Bottling Wine at a Small Winery”

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How to Control Your Wine Fermentation Temperature – WMA009

Fermentation tank with a glycol chilling system.
A glycol cooled fermentation tank.

The temperature of your wine fermentation plays a big role in how your final product will turn out. If it gets too hot or too cold things you can end up with flavor issues, or worse, a stuck fermentation.

In this podcast you’ll discover a few different ways of heating and cooling a fermenting wine to ensure that you maintain the proper temperature. There are simple and inexpensive methods and then, of course, there are most costly methods that can sometimes offer better temperature control. Continue reading “How to Control Your Wine Fermentation Temperature – WMA009”