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Don't know about the U.S. but here in Canada table grape prices swing wildly in the winter. I plan to buy several pounds when prices are low, rinse them in a K-meta solution, and then freeze them in 1-2 lb. bags. You can buy frozen grape must for winemaking. I don't see why I can't do the same...

My Covid gut takes that personally. A bit of dry(ing) humour. I used to put my carboys upside down in a clean milk carton to dry until I realized there's no reason for it unless the carboy is going to sit for a year or so. After the carboy gets a thorough washing, I pour a few ounces of K-Meta...

Following advice from Joeswine and a bit of experimenting, I've been adding black grocery store grapes (about 1 lb. per 5 gal batch) with most but not all of the juice pressed out to those "60-bottle" Costco kits for the past 18 months with very satisfactory results. I shorten the water to make...

Yes, use the same instructions for both the Chateau Argentia and the Cellar Master kits. You will get surprisingly good wine just by shorting the water by 4 litres to sit in a 5 gal (19 L) carboy. I get further improvements by: 1. Adding dried grape skins before introducing yeast. Since the...

Thanks so much for the info about aging oak for 1.5 to 3 years. I'm sure I've got a piece at least 3 years old that's been kept warm and dry. Another question: I can break it up into chips/chunks, or use a planer to create long, thin slivers, or saw it into pencil size bars. Don't know how they...

All the talk is about French vs American toasted white oak. Given the price of just a few ounces of packaged oak, any advice on whether I can toast some good old Canadian white oak to flavour reds during bulk aging. I do some woodwork and have pounds and pounds of white oak in chunks, slivers...

I usually stick bottles in hot water and let the labels peel off. For stubborn labels I put the bottles in an ice cooler and keep the water warm for 24 hours with a sous vide machine. That just leaves some of the real nasty ones. Unless I'm desperate, I let those go but if you really need every...

(b) -50%-75%. I made between 60-70% of the wine our household consumed this year. Since taking up winemaking seriously about two years ago, I've displaced all commercial products from our daily drinking fare with tweaked cheap kit wines with help principally from the Joeswine stream on this...

Your bread designs are wonderful. Question: How do you slice the bread for serving so that the slices are a lovely compliment to your creation. Whenever I make a nice sourdough loaf my arthritic hands end up delivering irregular chunks that look like they were hewed by Conan The Barbarian. I...

Has anyone tried grinding AP flour to make it finer — target 00? The cost of 00 is nuts so would love a work around. I tried it in my cheap blender at high speed for two series of three minutes. It feels finer but not quite the baby powder texture that 00 is supposed to have. I read in a blog...

I'm still perplexed by the taste of my Gewurtztraminer experiment. It's not awful — just really different. My wife and three of her friends liked it enough to select it over their usual ($10-$12) commercial whites over the summer. I'm glad I didn't have to pitch it but I don't think I'll be...

Technically, they call it a blush, a slightly less pinkish pink. From what I've read, the term blush originated with White Zinfandel.

The Costco Argentia Ridge Chardonnay + back sweetener from another wine upfront + four days on light purple table grape skins was a winner. 10 out of 10 preferred the light pink result to the straight-up Chardonnay, which was also very good. In both cases, I shorted the water to produce 25...

Never tried it myself but I have huge excess of shrink wrap caps from cheap Costco kits. I wonder whether shrink wrapping empty, corkless bottle tops would work.

And I thought they rocked Boston with a Tea Party!

I live in Canada so all prices are in $Cdn. I buy 60-bottle kits (50 bottle yield because of shorted water) both the Argentia Ridge and Cellar Master brands from Costco. They sell, respectively, for $104.99 and $99.99 including taxes and shipping to most places. I wait for a sale when prices...

I've been tweaking cheap Costco kits for a couple of years, at first shorting the water (topping to 19 litres rather than 23) and bulk aging at least eight months with very positive results. In the past eight months I've been adding grape skins, either the dry packs or skins and seeds from...

When I give away wine, the rules are clear: Return the bottle that has been thoroughly rinsed or you're cut off.

Every election there's a candidate who isn't running again or has signs too damaged to reuse. It's bad PR to send signs to landfill. You can get a lifetime supply of them from a single call. They work perfectly as cushions for your carboys.