How

That's funny it says"common WINEMAKING mistakes" . to make mistakes you HAVE TO MAKE WINE albeit badly but still.

I like the idea, I use my 3 gallon for beer and it works great.

Me too and I'm done

Because we don't want to cook the wine. "Cooked" or maderized wine is considered a wine fault/flaw that most consumers and judges would pick out pretty easily. If you are making fruit wine (apples, strawberries, etc), then by all means you can pasteurize, since there really isn't a quality standard to chase. With premium grapes, you don't want the chemical changes that occur when heated. Kosher wine is heated, but that is the exception and... It's not really considered premium because of it.

Very nice!

Me too Rich! Crushed and destemmed my Cabernet from Carmel valley today! I'm at about 50 gallons of must but we didn't weigh it. My pH meter broke so I'm hoping the replacement gets here soon. I was way high on the sugar. Pushing 28 brix. Gonna try to finish tomorrow before it gets too hot. Good luck Rich!

I got 20 cases that are 36 lbs. each so it was easy to calculate the total.

@@richca2004 haha yeah my grapes came in whatever buckets I could find to put them in and carry to the garage. After lugging them up the hill I was too tired to care what they weighed!

Rick...how many days can it take to ferment down to .0994 from 1.000

Thank you! Hybrid reds like frontenac usually have a lot of malic acid unless they are very very ripe. This can make the winemaking side a little tricky. If they are happily ripening, I'd let them go as long as reasonable possible. You will likely need to supplement with tartaric acid if you do let them hang but you will end up with a reasonable tartaric to malic ratio by doing so. If you don't have a good pH meter, definitely get one. Sometimes you can pick a hybrid at 3.2 and it can run up to 3.8 on you due to high potassium levels buffering the acids or malic acid being converted by the yeast or malolactic bacteria.

Hi Bill. Potassium metabisulfite is your main defense against oxidation which will happen whether the wine is in carboy or bottle if given enough time and a very small amount of oxygen. The only time you don't want to have the wine adequately sulfited is when an active fermentation is happening (yeast or MLF). At those times, the CO2 produced will provide some protection. Each time you rack and introduce oxygen, you usually lose about 10-15ppm free SO2, so you need to bump it back up a bit. A young wine will bind up about 30-40ppm of free SO2 in the first three or four months also, so you need to offset for that. A topped up carboy is critical and can allow you to run on the low side but it can't work miracles. I would definitely get some SO2 on it ASAP. Also, make sure you are minimizing the amount of racking you are doing. You only need to rack most wines two to three times, even if it were aged in carboy for a year or more. More racking means more oxygen which can slant the wine towards oxidized. If you are not racking off of the gross lees, it would slant the wine towards reduced which is just as bad, so it is important but more is not better.

Look up Star San on the web. They sell it as a concentrate and one bottle is basically a lifetime supply. Home brewers and winemakers use it. It is an odorless and tasteless organic acid so it won't contribute any bad flavors to your wine. Safe for stainless and most surfaces. They say you don't even have to rinse it off but I do, since it tends to foam up a bit. Surfaces are sterile after a one minute soak. It decomposes into a sugar so it won't hurt anything even if you don't rinse thoroughly. Never had a problem using it. Good luck to you!

Thanks! Technically yes but I probably wouldn't. White wines intentionally have very low polyphenol and tannin content and reds generally very high. If you do want to experiment, you should do some small bench trials before commiting to the full batch.

Thanks Randy. Small is ideal for wine grapes, particularly red wine grapes. The most premium grapes are about the size of blueberries. If the pH is within range (3.35-3.6), and the seeds are brown, I'd pick them now. The birds, or a change in the weather could very quickly ruin a good season.

Most wine yeasts will run the fermentation dry unless you intentionally stall them out by chilling very cold. Even the naturally present wild strains will usually take them dry. What you are talking about doing is back sweetening, which is very common. You not only need to get the wine off of the settled yeast but also need to prevent budding which is how yeast cells multiply. This is where potassium sorbate comes into play. After racking off the lees, and making sure the wine is crystal clear, you will add potassium sorbate to prevent re-fermentation. You also need to add potassium metabisulfite to prevent oxidation, microbial spoilage and malolactic fermentation. If malolactic bacteria consume the sorbic acid (potassium sorbate), they will create a geranium like oder which will ruin the wine. Note that the sulfite will not stick around if the wine is exposed to air whether it be too much headspace or a couple rackings.

Tannin normally won't stay in suspension in a dry wine. Does the plum wine have residual sugar? Even then it should fall out. If you were to dissolve in water I would expect the same outcome. How long has it been since you have added the tannin?

The wine was clear before I added the tannin, i bottled it after I added the tannin , and the tannin settles quickly in the bottles I’m just disappointed, in the future I’ll add it up front before my first racking ?

It should clear back up. You can expect it to temporarily cloud since you are adding a powdered product. If you did any mixing when adding the tannin, I would more blame the stirred up fine lees than the tannin for the haze. But that should also clear back up. Sometimes you may notice a haze in the summer when the wine warms up for the first time. This is not particularly common but is related to proteins in the wine becoming unstable at warmer temperatures. In that rare case, the solution would usually be to wait it out before bottling or fine with bentonite which has an opposite charge. I normally lean towards waiting things like that out rather than adding another treatment to the wine. I'm not sure what time scale you are on with your plum wine but 6 months would not be unusual for a wine like that to be reliably clear. Another haze consideration would be pectin if you are dealing with fresh fruit. You can diagnose a pectin haze by placing a few drops of isopropyl alcohol into a tsp or so of wine. If it gets stringy it is a pectin haze which can also be fined out but is best prevented with pectic enzyme prior to fermentation.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel . Thank you for the break down, your help is priceless ! 👍🇺🇸

That's how it starts! In a few years you will be thinking about starting a small winery.

6.45?!?! I would check your pH meter against some pH buffer to verify the reading is accurate. At 6.45 there is no amount of SO2 (Camden tabs) that can protect the wine. The range a wine should fall into is 3 orders of magnitude more acidic (pH 3.2-3.8). The pH scale is logarithmic so 5.45 is 10x more acidic than 6.45, and 3.45 is 1000x more acidic. 1000x meaning the strength of the acid. 6.45 is nearly neutral, where 3.45 (normal wine range) is very acidic and requires only a bit of SO2 to combat microbes. Your wine is probably not salvageable at this point or at least will not be able to be what we are used to calling wine. The film is probably safe, but at that pH, all bets are off.

I'm normally looking for 3.6-3.75.

Kits usually have a "kit taste" which is normally isoamyl-acetate which smells like banana runts or circus peanut candy. That is probably not what you are noticing though. It may be malic acid, since virtually all store bought red wines have gone through MLF. It may also be just a little more dissolved CO2 in the wine which can fight the acids a bit. Kits are usually bottled very young so they don't have time to really round out... But if you give them the time they need, they are thin. Even the highest quality red kits are pretty obvious to an experienced taster and it's not a great thing. I think a lot of home winemakers get into winemaking before really developing a palate for red wine so they may not notice or may prefer the lighter, low intensity of a kit wine and not really notice the off flavors. A big red, fermented on the skins will whack you in the face for the first six months and often takes about a year and a half to begin to get approachable. Some hobby level winemakers may not have the patience for a red wine to come around which may also drive some towards kits. My recommendation for you though is to forget the kits and make wine from good quality grapes and ferment on the skins. You can make an $80 caliber red wine at home from grapes, whereas the best you are going to get from a kit will be in the sub $10 caliber. To a lot of newer drinkers the cheap wine will be more approachable but once you develop a taste for better wines the two buck chuck will not cut it anymore.

Your diffusion stone can be helpful if you catch a whiff of hydrogen sulfide and want to treat the wine. That is actually a common winery technique. I would hesitate to use it before the fermentation was actively roaring along because you may excite some microbes that are not wine yeast. In red winemaking too much oxygen would be hard to do but with pure oxygen it might be a little too much. Yeast actually creates water and CO2 in the presence of air rather than alcohol and CO2. Even when you give it a good bit of air normally it will mostly remain anaerobic since it is producing so much CO2 to saturate the wine. White wine can brown in a heartbeat before fermentation kicks off. This is called hyper oxidation and is a technique that is sometimes used.

add more sugar and a bit of water. You should choose a more natural sugar rather then refined sugar.

Thank you!

Rotten egg smell (Hydrogen Sulfide) is a byproduct of stressed yeast. The most common reason would be the fermentation was air starved and low on nutrient. The other likely contributor in your case is low pH. Unless the blackberries are very ripe, you may end up with a pH that is sub 3.0 which makes for a very harsh environment. I'd probably target about 3.2 to start a blackberry wine if you are planning on later back sweetening it. Maybe a little higher (3.3-3.4) if you plan to bottle dry. Some yeast strains love to produce hydrogen sulfide (like D47). There are some that are incapable of it (Renaissance Brio). You should be smelling your wine every day during fermentation. If you catch H2S as soon as it starts to happen, you can usually give the wine some air and nutrient and solve the issue. Ideally you want to prevent it all together but it is very treatable. Don't use any copper treatments during active fermentation or you could make the issue worse.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel thank you for the advice sir I will be starting a new batch today. have a great week

I am new(ish) to wine making too with same question. Disappointing that someone that “knows” hasn’t answered but I have several sizes of glass jugs and carboys (half gallon, gallon, 3 gallon, 5 gal, 6 gal) so I’ll rack from the 5 gal to the 3 plus a 1 gal and maybe a half gal all fitted with airlocks of course. The half and 1 gallons are used to keep the carboys full at the next racking. If I have a partial half gallon I drink it though I’d bet you could freeze it until needed as make up volume in next racking. I am very sure you could put a little sugar solution (just enough to provoke some additional fermentation) in the part full carboy and the brief fermentation it causes will drive the oxygen out the airlock but I haven’t actually done it.

@@dac7046 I doubt the channel will be notified of a reply on someone's comment. I can't answer your question. Add a new comment instead of a reply.

Normally you wouldn't boil them but for an obscure wine like blackberry it isn't the worst thing. You would be cooking the berries which would create a cooked fruit flavor but most people associate "blackberry" taste with the cooked version anyways.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel That's a good point. I'm doing a side by side comparison to see the difference. I'll try to give an update when it's ready.

Tannin will not reduce the pH but will add balance to some extent on the palate and provide some protection against oxidation. You have a high pH, high TA situation. TA has no effect on microbial stability but can impact the perception of acid in the finished wine. pH measures the strength of the acids in the wine which also is the main driver in how friendly or unfriendly the wine is to unwanted spoilage organisms. If you keep your pH high like that, you won't have a wine to worry about dialing in later. I'd probably double check the TA and make sure your chemicals are fresh and that you are using the method where you find the end point with a pH meter rather than a dye. From there, I'd probably get the pH down at least into the 3.7 range. You can try to cold stabilize later and hope to drive down the TA. I'm guessing the wine has a lot of potassium and will throw a lot of potassium bitartrate. I would probably ignore the TA for now and blend for taste later. Ideally you will blend with a low TA wine. You can also consider ion exchange to fix the TA. If the wine does have a high TA plan on aging it a lot longer before it smooths out. DO NOT ignore the pH at this stage. And make 100% sure your pH meter is calibrated against some pH buffer. You will need to be very careful even above 3.7 but above 3.8 you can get into irreversible trouble quick once fermentation is over.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Thanks for the quick response. I have calibrated for ph and used your ph method to test for TA (thanks!). I guess I'm wondering now if I should start mlf or throw it into the fridge first?

I would start MLF but get your pH down to about 3.7 before doing so and check it about once every two weeks. I am guessing you will need a little acid as it moves along

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Thanks so much! You're the best!! (ps: I did put your website bumper sticker on my car now! 😉)