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It most likely had more flavor at SG=1.008 because it tasted sweeter due to the residual sugar. You can't ferment wine too long unless the plan was to try to stop the fermentation at some point in order to retain a wine's sweetness. Doing that results in less alcohol and an unbalanced wine...

Great concept! The way that the oak staves are cut provides a lot of surface area for the wine to oak exposure. I also like that adding or removing staves is as easy as pulling a cork. Although, the cost is high compared to competing products, I can understand its justification based on the...

The white wines I make from kits usually are good at nine months and seem to improve over the next nine months. That initial blandness you mentioned may go away over the next few months. You won't notice much change after that. At the worse, you'll end up with a table wine. Chill it in the...

Thanks, @DizzyIzzy. I'll check those two websites out.

I'm not very artistic so I tend to use labels that come with wine kits or buy wine labels from Label Peelers. However, I have made a few labels and found the Avery.com software easy and intuitive to use.

You can rack it a third time, it wont hurt, but you don't have too. I filter my wines so after the wine is stabilized, I use my buon vino junior pump to filter it into the bottling bucket and bottle it. Many of the guys on this board age it in the carboy for six months to a year but I don't have...

It's still settleing. Give it two weeks after adding sparkalloid. Then rack it. With a wine made from fruit, you sometimes have to give it another clearing agent treatment to get all the pulp out of suspension.

OK, you're further along than I thought. In that case, you did the right thing in topping up. Is your intent to bottle within a few weeks or age your wine in the carboy.

It sounds like you're at the stage where fermentation is almost finished or just fully completed. At this point, your wine is still saturated with CO2. Your next step, assuming your dealing with a wine kit, will be to rack the wine to another carboy, degas it, and add stabilizers. Assuming...

I've recently started using colmated corks, the specific brand being Acquamark. Colmated corks are solid wine corks that didn't make one of the solid cork grades due to small holes and cavities. Acquamark fills these cavities with a water based sealant. The result is a very nice looking wine...

Where I live, the water has a strong fluoride taste so I always use bottled spring water when making wine kits.

Thanks for the confirmation on the use of both, @Chuck E . Since I'm already beyond primary in this wine kit's process, I'll save the raisin pack of another red wine kit that lacks neither grape skins nor raisins.

I'm making a Renaissance Nebbiolo, my first Mosti Mondiale branded kit. Starting it today, I noticed that it came with oak chips, a grape pack, and a raisin pack. The instructions say to put only one of the fruit packs in, but not both. I chose the grape pack. Oak chips are slated to go into the...

I have yet to find a good dough recipe, @zelix. Mind giving us yours?

It hard to loose a friend, @hounddawg. I feel for you.

I usually give the 100 cork bag a few squirts of Kmeta from a spray bottle before storing the left overs for the next batch. This is done in the belief that the fumes from Kmeta will serve to keep them safe from airborne bacteria and fungus. Doing this, I think, is similar to @TonyP's corkidor...

Welcome to the Winemaking Forum, George. You've got he right idea about using all that inexpensive fruit to make expensive wine. However, you may have a problem in getting the winemaking supplies you need. I'm not sure how available wine yeast and some of the chemicals we use in winemaking are...

The Portuguese floor corker has worked well for me since I'm not a big volume bottler. I typically make 4 to 5 six gallon batches of wine per year.