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Sanitation is, of course, important but not protection against oxidation. I would never skip meta. It's a simple thing to do.

Some kits say add the chitosan 24 hours after the kieselsol some say an hour. I just add them one after the other with very little time between. I once added chitosan and skipped the kieselsol, things cleared just fine.

I use non-chlorinated water from my well.

Exactly. I use a 7.5 gallon primary and the foam in a 6 gallon kit sometimes touches the lid. I use a 6 gallon bottling bucket and 6 gallons of wine neary fills it to the brim

The FW Super Tuscan is dynamite! The Private Reserve Fiero, Primitivo is excellent. Not available at this time since it was a limited edition kit, but if it becomes available it's definitely one to try. Most of the Valpolicella kits yield a very pleasant quick drinking wine.

This has been my experience with elderberry--very flat without the addition of acid. Yes, concord/elder is a great combo

Since I always ferment to dry, I never use sorbate. I do use meta at bottling to protect the wine. As for degassing, I have skipped it many times since I splash rack a few times prior to bottling. A couple of times, when I bottled early the wine retained some CO2 and I got bubbles when I...

I have made many kits of Pinot Noir, Wine Expert, RJS, etc. I recently tasted the FW pinot that I bottled at the end of July--the best Pinot ever!

Back when I made large quantities of wine from grapes, I typically racked when primary fermentation was complete and added 1/4t per 5 gallons at that time. Then during the clarification stage I would rack every 2 or 3 months and added 1/4 tsp at each racking and finally 1/4t at bottling. While...

Yep, I have had problems with FedEx for years--packages misrouted, packages delivered to the wrong address, drivers not able to find my house.

I will be starting a viognier later this week. I plan to use QA23 yeast--fruity, floral, spicy.

The juice in one of the FWK whites that I made was quite slushy when I removed it from the packaging. At first I was a bit concerned but then realized it was just thawing from a frozen state.

Which yeast do you like for rosé?

Local restaurants are a good source of used bottles. Most of the bottle in my cellar came from restaurants.

First off, the oak boards at Lowe's are Red Oak not White. Second they are not toasted. You CAN toast your own White Oak but it's more an art than a science. Here's an interesting article Making Your Own Toasted Oak For Wine - Wine Making and Beer Brewing Blog - Adventures in Homebrewing

I make vinegar in my pantry (room temp) as my cellar is basically too cold for satisfactory vinegar production

Wow, that's a lot of topping up! I rarely need to use more than half a bottle to top up--I use 5 gallon carboys along with smaller vessels for a 23 litre batch after primary fermentation

I'm ready to start my first Wine Lovers kit--a medium body Gamay. Several people have commented on the amount of juice in the various kits. The medium bodied kits contain 5.2 litres of juice while the heavy bodied kits contain 16 litres. Both kinds make 23 litres of wine. My question is, "Do...

Based on the comments in the "end of year tasting" I will definitely order the FW Bordeaux kit.

I did not use the finishing pack, just 1/4t meta prior to bottling. Also, when I added the second nutrient pack I discovered that I had neglected to add the first nutrient pack when I started the kit.