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The First Winemaker’s Academy Wine Tasting

This past weekend (July 7th 2013) my wife and I hosted the very first wine tasting showcasing the wines produced during The Great Riesling Yeast Experiment (part i, part ii, part iii). It was held at our house with just one other couple we invited over.

The point of this wine tasting, and the point of the experiment, was to determine if you could produce distinctly different wines by fermenting the same grape juice with different strains of yeast. I split a six gallon World Vineyard Riesling kit into two, three gallon batches and fermented them separately, one with RHST and the other with W15 yeast strains.

The spread at the first Winemaker's Academy Wine Tasting

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Cold Stabilization of Wine

Cold stabilization of wine is a method used to keep tartaric acid crystals from forming after the wine has been bottled. This process is referred to as cold stabilization because it is the act of cooling the wine that causes tartaric acid to form tartrate crystals, also known as wine crystals or wine diamonds.

If wines are not cold stabilized there is a chance that these crystals will form when consumers place bottles of wine in the refrigerator or store it for long periods of time. While the crystals are harmless it can be rather unsettling to find what looks like broken glass in your wine if you don’t know what it really is.

Cold stabilization of wine can prevent the formation of tartrate crystals.
Tartrate crystals on a cork.

Why do Tartrate Crystals Form?

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Should You Soak or Boil Corks Before Bottling?

It is often recommended that wine makers soak or even boil corks prior to bottling. Is this really necessary? Let’s take a look.

Why Some Recommend Soak and / or Boil Corks

Boiling wine corks is a bad idea. It ruins the cork and leaves you in danger of ruining your wine.Soaking corks came about as a way to clean the dust off of new corks. However, even back before pre-sterilized corks were available corks were not soaked for very long. Somewhere along the way some wine makers decided that this is a necessary step during the bottling process.

Long soaking times, however, allow the cork to absorb whatever liquid it is submerged. That liquid can then be squeezed out of the cork when it is inserted into the bottle. Anything that comes out of the cork at that point goes into your wine.

Boiling corks likely came about as a means to ensure the corks were sanitized. This would be a great way to sanitize corks without using chemical, however, boiling corks can seriously damage them and make your wine more susceptible to problems. Continue reading “Should You Soak or Boil Corks Before Bottling?”

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Specific Gravity Temperature Correction Calculator

All hydrometers are calibrated to be accurate at a given temperature. Most newer hydrometers are calibrated for 68 degrees (F). Because the density of fluids changes as their temperature changes if you don’t measure your specific gravity at your hydrometers calibration temperature you’re going to get an inaccurate reading.

Hydrometer calibration temperature printed on scale within the hydrometer.
Hydrometer calibration temperature as printed on my hydrometer.

While the correction may be small for a single reading if you don’t adjust, it becomes increasingly difficult to compare readings over time. For instance, if you take an original specific gravity reading at 75 degrees (F) and a final reading at 65 degrees (F) you can’t compare these readings because the fluid densities are different at the different temperatures. You must correct each of your readings for temperature differences before you can compare them. Continue reading “Specific Gravity Temperature Correction Calculator”

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Wine Alcohol Content Calculator

Calculating the alcohol content of a wine that you made is always fun. While amateur wine makers don’t need to report this value to anyone it’s just neat to know how much alcohol you’ve produced.

Use Wine Equations and Calculators Only

A winery lab setup for determining alcohol content.
Winery determining alcohol content through distilling.

There are many formulas out there for calculating the percent alcohol of wine and beer. You may have noticed that they’re not the same. Largely this is because the relationship between the specific gravity and the amount of alcohol produced is not linear.

What this means is that specific gravity and alcohol content have a complex relationship that is not easily represented with a simple equation. Non-linear equations can be pretty nasty to deal with. Continue reading “Wine Alcohol Content Calculator”