Your Winemaking Educational Source
A strawberry mead recipe by Matt Williams.
This was my first fruit wine that I ever made. I used frozen strawberries from the grocery store and a local Colorado honey.
It took about 3 weeks to fully ferment and I recommend giving it a full six months or more to clear. I opted not to degas the mead as the tiny amount of carbonation added a nice touch to the finished product. The final alcohol content was 14.25% prior to back sweetening (optional). Continue reading “Matt’s Strawberry Melomel”
The dictionary definition of amelioration is “to make better”. In wine making this is exactly our aim when we ameliorate our wine must, however, as wine makers we have a much more specific definition of the term.
Ameliorating wine is simply adding water to unfermented must with the purpose of making the finished wine better. Some wine makers use the term ameliorate to describe the addition of water or sugar to a must, however, this can get confusing so we’ll use the term ameliorate to describe the addition of water to must. Continue reading “How to Ameliorate 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”
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?”
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.
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”