Winemaking Articles and Info
Wine country isn’t just for professionals. Thousands of amateurs make great wine at home every year and so can you. Being rooted in the heart of wine country gives us unique access to knowledge and products for home winemaking. We have been at it for over 30 years and we are still in the forefront of the fermentation movement. Today, we are extremely well qualified and fully equipped to help you achieve success in your new hobby. We have designed this website to help you find all the products you need and the information that you want. Wine making is easy and fun. You’ll see!
Our catalog/newsletter will get you started with instructions
for beginners, as well as useful articles for experienced winemakers. From beginners kits, to presses and crushers, our whole inventory can be found here. Our location in Sonoma County for 27 years has kept us in constant contact with grape growers and winemakers who have shared their expertise with us. Let us bring award winning winemaking to you. We're here to show you the way. Call us today. 800.544.1867 One of the most important aspects of any fermentation is keeping your equipment sanitary. This article outlines the basic steps and products for keeping it clean. For most beginners, the hardest thing about making wine is simply figuring out, in advance, what equipment is going to be needed. This list should set most of these fears to rest.
This article outlines the essential steps in making red wine, from grapes to glass. This article outlines the essential steps in making white wine, which differ slightly from the above red winemaking procedures. A reference guide for general barrel care including swelling, acidifying, cleaning, as well as short and long term storage. There are several ways of adding oak flavor and aroma
without using a barrel. Homemade oak extract is a sound alternative to barrel
storage. So why chemistry? Without knowing some of the chemistry of wine, a home winemaker may
be flying blind—or at least wearing dark glasses with the lights off. While some rules of thumb and general guidelines can point the winemaker in the right direction, there’s nothing like a trial for really pinning down the best treatment. After you read this article and feel you are ready to perform your own table trials, click here and print a full size trial placemat. “Burnt rubber” is one of many
unpleasant descriptors applied to the volatile reduced sulfur (VRS) compounds
than can occur during the fermentation and aging of wine. If you detect this kind of aroma, fix it quick! For the 2006 harvest, my wife Marty White and I decided to give several home
kits and techniques a try. We used the SAP panel from Vinquiry as our reference
and ran our own tests to match on our home-grown pinot noir and chardonnay. The SAP and SNAP panels are a way you can test your wine for sugar, nutrients, acidity, and pH. With labratory testing performed by Vinquiry in Winsor, you'll then have the staff of the Beverage People to help with interpretation of your results. Since Syrah does well as both rosé and port, and one seeks to produce
less and the other more from the grapes, maybe we could make both from the same lot of
grapes. For the 2006 harvest, my wife Marty White and I set out to do just that. Better known among home winemakers as malolactic bacteria, Oenococcus oeni bacteria are
mostly a friendly beast. However, there are times that the work of Oenococcus is not welcomed by the winemaker. Eliminating residual Oenococcus may help prevent development of
undesirable volatile acids, histamines, and other off aromas or flavors. Why is it that it's so hard to remember how many containers are needed for your batch of wine, or how much some odd lot of grapes will yield? Sonoma County produces a wide range of agricultural products in addition to wine grapes. Apples are especially abundant in the Sebastopol-Forestville area and high quality honeys are produced by local apiaries. Apple juice and honey combine to made a wonderful fermented beverage called Cyser. Nowadays, we hear a lot more people talk about "extended maceration" (long skin contact) than we did just a few years ago. This approach has now become widely recognized as a sophisticated "third way" of approaching red wine fermentation.
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