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After nearly three weeks in the carboy, this has cleared perfectly. Sneaked a little sample and it's tasting superb already. A few more weeks yet but this will be an early bottler I think.

Primary finished on this one with a final sg of 0.994, which should give me an ABV of 13.4%. Beautiful golden colour at the moment as it sits in the carboy.

Generally my final sg on both new and old kits has been 0.992 (dry white wines), with one at 0.994, so don't believe it's a difference between the old and new kits.

Really interesting - the instructions just say 'aging' and don't mention whether that is bulk aging or bottle aging. So I've always added 1/4 tsp at bottling.

Pitched this one this morning. Following on from the comments above, and just to play it safe as I'll only do this once, I've followed the directions to the letter, no tweaks, pitching both yeasts. Opening SG of 1.096. No grapefruit zest unfortunately as grapefruit affects the medicine that my...

Finally received delivery of the WE LE20 Torrontes Muscat kit this morning. Very excited about this one - it's my first LE kit and I love Torrontes so have high hopes. I had a quick peek inside and there are no real surprises - 14L juice bag, and standard clearing packs. It comes with two...

Yes I agree, again just my £0.02 too. I can't see any logic why they would do it if it reduced quality. Companies like this generally innovate to make the quality better, or the same but cheaper.

Thanks all, great advice. I've got a couple of whites still in the pipeline but I think I might try something a bit different after that and this one this is definitely the favourite. I've also been toying with doing an Apres Raspberry Chocolate dessert port but they seem to be out of stock...

Over the last few days I've read through all 23 pages of this, and it's been absolutely fascinating and a wealth of useful information. Myself and the other half generally only drink dry wine white, so I've only ever made dry white whites. And we love them - in fact the other half prefers them...

The Winexpert NZ Marlborough Sauv Blanc comes with 2 yeasts EC-1118 and K1-V1116 - which is an interesting combination as I believe they are both dominant yeasts so I'm not sure what the thought process is behind having the two. I've done the kit twice - following the instructions the first time...

Yes, I follow a similar principle and haven't had any issue with any sediment in bottles (although I haven't any that are that old to be honest!). I play it really safe on later rackings to make it clean as possible, and then pour the excess into a big kilner jar which I then leave to settle...

True, but what if the grape is Sauvignon Banc but not from say, Chile, but grown elsewhere that has similar terrior (or Sav Blanc blend to make it taste like a Chilean). So they can't say it's Chilean Sauvignon Blanc (as it's not from Chile) but can say it's Chilean Sauvignon Blanc style, so the...

Cheers all, really interesting to know. I'll continue to sprinkle as it's worked fine to date.

I have only done wine kits to date, and the ones I've done generally have instructions to sprinkle the yeast packet on top of the juice and let it go. And this has worked to date with no issues. However I notice that lots of people talk about rehydrating yeast, and I even think the instructions...

I agree, the California Riesling is one of our favourites. I prefer it bone dry, but it's still nice and fruity. Def recommended!

Which WE Riesling kit is it? I've made the California Riesling kit before, but that's a dry wine so I suspect it's one of the other ones.

Not quite sure that's entirely true - while the majority of things are metric, people in the UK are still more comfortable talking in miles for distance, feet and inches for height, and stones/lbs for weight.

I actually think whites are more likely to hit the mark, and much more quickly. Reds take a bit more nurturing over time to get a similar result. In terms of recommendations, it all comes down to what whites you like to drink. Dry or off-dry is probably the key question. Personally we love a...

Yes 100% agree. One of the big mistakes I made when I started was doing a couple of batches and then pausing for a couple of months because I foolishly thought that 60 bottles would keep me going for a while. I soon realised that I was just slowly drinking my way through it too early - and would...

Personally I only make whites so bottle aging suits me - the wine is really good from 3mths, so I can enjoy the journey drinking steadily over the next year or so knowing it's all good (and obviously working out where it peaks so that I know when I should be focusing my main drinking in the next...