Your Winemaking Educational Source
One day your wine is happily fermenting along, you’re ready to rack, and while you’ve got the airlock off you notice something is up with your wine. Maybe it’s an off flavor or aroma. Maybe you notice the airlock wasn’t seated properly.
These things happen all the time. Knowing what to do, however, can prevent you from making bigger mistakes. This recently happened to me. Continue reading “What to Do if Something Goes Wrong”
Mead was the first fermented beverage ever produced. It’s production dates all the way back to 7000 B.C which predates wine by three thousand years. To make mead is to partake in the oldest of traditions.
While mead is not technically wine, the process of making mead is very similar. And as a winemaker, you can learn a lot from doing it.
Simply put, it involves creating a must that you add yeast to and let it ferment. After fermentation, you rack it, age it, and then bottle it.
Keeping a winemaking log is critically important to your growth as a winemaker. However, if you’re not logging useful information it won’t do you much good.
In the short-term a well-kept winemaking log can help you keep the timing of each step straight. It also serves as a double-check of how much of what additives you’ve put in and when you did it.
The long-term benefits, however, can be much more valuable. Continue reading “3 Keys to a Creating a Useful Winemaking Log”
Yeast is the most critical ingredient in the wine making process. When you pick a wine making yeast you are, in effect, choosing the destiny of your wine. The right yeast or yeasts can transform a good grapes into a great wine.
Being able to evaluate your wine objectively is vitally important to successful winemakers. You should know how to discern whether your wine is of good quality or not. Whether you like your wine or not is much less important.
It’s possible to make a high quality wine that you just don’t like personally. I for one am not a fan of Sauvignon Blanc, regardless of how well made it is. But as I wine maker you and I both should be able to tell if it’s well made. Continue reading “How to Evaluate Your Wine”