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We have been visiting family in Paraguay for the last month. Breakfast is typically sausages made from the sheep on their farm. Lunch is the main meal and is something like a leg of lamb, steaks, or some other BBQ meat. Dinner is often a smaller affair, unless you wait until 7:30-8pm, then it's...

Visiting family in Paraguay (South America). No wine today (too hot and dry here to grow anything local), but I did pick up a few bottles of South American Whisky for about $5-7 USD each. I won't drink the south American stuff until I get home (not expecting it to be any good, but will be...

Niagara Falls, NY

Do you have a siphon? The simplest method for racking is to use gravity. Old carboy/bucket up on a counter, new one on the floor. Suspend the racking cane just above all the junk on the bottom of the carboy. Get your Siphon going and all the clear wine goes down into the new carboy, leaving all...

Those grapes may have come from one of my cousins or uncles fields, maybe even the same field I picked my Merlot from this year. Should be good, enjoy!

Last year I made a sweet cherry wine, also 3 gallons. I used 13lbs of cherries. To that I added about 1/2 gallon cherry juice, and 1.5 gallons water, and 4lbs sugar. Turned out really well, I'd made it again. It's about 12% alcohol. With just 4 lbs of cherries if you just use water I think...

Not sure, maybe it was because I bottled same day I added the conditioner, and it didn't fully disperse.

About 6 weeks ago I bottled a bunch of stuff, including 5 cases of our Muscat, which I had filtered (5 micron), sulfited (30ppm), and back sweetened (wine conditioner with sorbate in it) Opened a bottle today and and it was sparking. Looked at a few more and see some cloudyness in them. I'm...

Hard to say on the TA kit without seeing the instructions. The one I use doesn't sound quite like yours. With mine you take about 15ml sample of the wine/must, add 3 drops of pheno. Now start adding the SH in 1ml increments, stirring the solution in between. you'll see it temporarily change...

It's funny, I make around 100 bottles a year, but drink less than 1 bottle a week. Lots goes as gifts, and building up a supply.

I haven't made kits, just from grapes or fresh juice so I don't use water expect for dissolving additions . When I do that, I use reverse osmosis water if I'm doing something larger like making syrup for back sweetening. If I am just dissolving some sulfites I use tap water, at that...

I was picking Merlot last weekend and saw a few vines with bright red leaves. It was a small minority of them so not sure why.

Pressed my Merlot that has been sitting on the skins since last weekend. Got 42L of juice.

Looks good. Tomorrow I plan to pick a bunch more ghost peppers and dry them again. I've made a few hot sauce batches this year already so think I'm good with those.

Hah! True. I normally just starsan my arms and punch down by hand. However with reds I then tend to have purple looking hands/arms after a few days :)

Yep like Scooter said, I don't go closer than in inch to the rubber bung, as the level will rise/fall based on temp and I don't want the wine touching the rubber bung.

I'd go up another inch, want the more narrow area for less air contact

I got a set of Atlas 772 Nitrile gloves today for $5, on the off chance I could use them for punching down wine cap? Any thoughts on using these for that purpose (after washing and sanitizing)? Manufacturer doesn't list food safeness, but some websites selling them say for food prep...

Yea forced carbonation is safer, but you need more equipment. Coming from the beer world I'm sure spinningdog is familiar with priming in bottle or in bulk just before bottling, but having added that sorbate you've given yourself a headache trying to get that to happen properly. As meadmaker...

The Camden tablet is your sulfite so it makes the wine less hospitable to the yeast. The sorbate prevents the yeast from multiplying. So if you added more yeast now, likely nothing would happen. I definitely would not back sweeten and also add yeast. Even with the sorbate in there the risk of...