I really don’t know why I have a propensity of waiting six months to use my Christmas presents. Kathy gave me a filter for Christmas. We did not filter wines and Kathy made a Muscat that has sediment in the bottle. Normally sediment doesn’t bother us. However, once you pour a glass of the Muscat […]
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In two weeks we’ll attend the annual Wineries Unlimited Trade Show and Conference in Richmond, Virginia. Like last year, Kathy and I will split up to take different sessions so we can cover more of the conference. I have a tendency to cover the enology sessions while Kathy likes to cover the marketing sessions. Fortunately […] It’s the first of the year and for the past several years I’ve made some winemaking resolutions. Last year I was three for four only failing on the resolution to harvest grapes grown at my house. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong including birds and rain prior to, during and after harvest time. […] At the urging of another wine writer, I decided to once again give a kit wine a try. My first kit wine attempt was a Cabernet Sauvignon. Since then I’ve come to discover, that for me a red wine needs to be made with grapes and kit red wines or juice don’t measure up to […] Kathy’s peach wine has been sitting quietly clearing nicely. We decided to rack it off the lees today. The aroma prior to racking reminded me of aromas in the kitchen when Kathy bakes bread. There was an yeasty aroma from the wine. Later we place a small amount in a wine glass. At first the […] Since we are going to travel for a few weeks we decided to rack the peach wine. The wine was in a 3-gallon carboy, a half-gallon carboy and a 750 ml decanter. Both the decanter and the half gallon carboy had about an inch of sediment and dead yeast cells at the bottom. The 3-gallon […] Since the bubbling in the airlock was significantly slower than a couple days ago, we decided to rack the peach wine into a carboy. First Kathy gathered the floating peaches and put them in a cheesecloth. I’ll get back to this later. Then we measured the specific gravity of the wine at 1.010. It has […] Both the peach wine and Sauvignon Blanc are in primary fermenters with an airlock. It’s interesting to note that I’m drawn to observe the bubbling in the airlock. One might think that is a boring activity, however, I find it fascinating to stare at bubbles being released. The Sauvignon Blanc was the first to begin […] After making wine from juice and grapes both at home and at wineries, making another wine from a kit seems like a step backward. On the negative side, I don’t like the “kit wine taste” that I often pick up. So I decided to only look at higher quality kits. Since I only want to […] |
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How Do You Know if Your Wine Is Good?
We have been opening some of the bottles that we bottled in August after spending 20 months in French oak. How do we know if the wine is good? Taste is obvious, but are there other external factors that may indicate that you have a winner or plonk?
I took several cases to my brother […]