So I am often asked a lot of questions about making wine, and I thought that – rather than make a whole bunch of separate pages – a lot of these could be combined into a single page. My vision for this page is that, unlike the recipe pages, it will be updated frequently. So check back often for updates. If there is a question that you would like to see me address, then by all means make a comment and I will do my best to answer it.
1. Do I really need a hydrometer?
It depends on what you mean by “need.” Can you ferment sugar into alcohol without a hydrometer? Of course. Do most winemakers start their first few batches without a hydrometer? Almost certainly. When you are just starting the hobby, you should probably spend your money on things like carboys and Star Sans (sanitizing concentrate) and airlocks. But a hydrometer should be one of the things that you purchase relatively early in your hobby. Why? Because without one you have no way of precisely quantifying the amount of sugar that is in your must and your wine, and therefore you have no way of knowing how much alcohol is in your finished product. If you are lucky enough that the recipe is just perfect, then you can probably get away with it. But my recipes are intended to be flexible. I don’t always follow them precisely. And the hydrometer gives you the ability to be flexible and add the correct amount of sugar rather than adding whatever the recipe calls for. It is much easier to make these kinds of adjustments to the must than to try to correct the recipe once primary fermentation has been completed. The hydrometer is the tool that allows you to make those kinds of adjustments with precision.
2. Do I really need to sanitize?
Yes. You should view your winemaking as a surgery. Once you open up the vessel, you are exposing the sensitive inner parts to whatever is in the environment. If you do not sanitize, you can easily get an infection. There are tons of wild fungi and bacteria and viruses that can contaminate your wine. Some of these critters themselves have culinary uses, such as acetic acid bacteria that are capable of creating vinegar. But presumably you want wine – not vinegar – so you will have to keep them out. Other little creatures will give your wine bad flavors and some of them will ruin it completely. So yeah, you are taking a risk any time that you introduce anything to your wine, so whatever comes in contact with your wine needs to be sanitized. That having been said, I also like to emphasize that wine is a forgiving product. There’s a good chance that the alcohol in the wine will kill off any baddies that you introduce, so if you forget to sanitize once in awhile, you shouldn’t just assume that the wine is ruined. It’s worth seeing what turns out.
3. Should I be using distilled water?
Counterintuitively, no. Distilled water has no minerals and you do want the minerals in the water because they help the yeast do their job. If you want to use “purified” water, it is best to buy the stuff that is labeled “drinking water” because usually there are still a few minerals present. Or you can buy the stuff that has “minerals added.” But the most cost effective approach might be to use tap water. The chlorinates will gas out of the water during the course of fermentation, and the yeast won’t be bothered with them prior to that. Plus, all the minerals will still be present. That having been said, until I realized that distilled water shouldn’t be used, that’s what I was using and I have never had any problems with it.
4. Why Star San sanitizer? Wouldn’t bleach be cheaper and better?
Star San is better in almost every way. Bleach might (or might not) be slightly cheaper. (But not by much because Star San is incredibly concentrated and works out to a few cents per spray bottle.) And you can use bleach in a pinch, for sure, because it is very effective. But bleach has several disadvantages. First, bleach requires a longer contact time. (The recommended contact time of bleach for sanitization purposes is 10-60 minutes! Whereas the recommended contact time of Star San is one minute.) So if you use Star San you can sanitize quickly and then get on with it. Second, Star San is no rinse, whereas bleach must be rinsed away thoroughly. Properly diluted, Star San will not harm your must or wine. In fact, in a must it serves as a yeast nutrient. Properly diluted, Star San won’t harm much of anything (that you care about), which means that a diluted batch can be put in a spray bottle which makes it very convenient. In fact, that is how most of us use it. By contrast, you would have to be out of your mind to put a bleach solution in a spray bottle (with limited exceptions, of course). Properly diluted, Star San is non-toxic and environmentally friendly. Notice that I keep saying, “properly diluted.” It is very important to dilute Star San to the recommended level of dilution.
5. Do you know of a good book of recipes for non-traditional or non-grape wines?
In fact, I do. Jack Keller has produced an incredibly comprehensive book of recipes for non-grape wines. Keller did an exceptional amount of work for the community as a kind of labor of love. However, in 2020, Keller sadly passed away. Upon his death, his extensive website was no longer maintained – existing now only in archival form – and the community lost not only only a home winemaking icon but also many of the resources that he had collected over the years. However, a dedicated group of home vintners scoured the web for archives of Jack’s recipes, and it was produced in book form. This volume is available for free download at the Susquehanna Winemaker’s Guild website.
6. Do you get a commission for any products you recommend?
As of now, no. I have no affiliate links and am not paid by anyone with a stake in the industry. I make 100% of my income via my philosophy work. So, if I recommend something it’s because I like the product. However, if I ever do use an affiliate link in the future I would always disclose that fact.
7. Your wines sound great. Can I buy them?
No. None of my wines are for sale. Sadly, the sale of wine is federally regulated. I cannot sell any of my wines without engaging with a complex bureaucracy at both the federal level and the state level. I occasionally gift them, but at the moment my wines are primarily for my own enjoyment. As a side note, I do not agree with the federal rules, which seem draconian to me, and in reality seem designed to privilege the large corporate producers over smaller individual producers by presenting a barrier to entry. But whether I agree with the rules or not, they are what they are.
8. I am just getting started with winemaking. What yeast should I use?
There are two yeasts that I would unequivocally recommend to any beginning winemaker. It’s not that there aren’t equally good yeasts out there. Nor is it even that there aren’t other yeasts that at times might be more appropriate for your particular batch. It’s just that it is hard to go wrong with either of these two yeasts. They are both relatively fool proof yeasts that reliably get the job done and produce very good to superb wines. And these two yeasts are Red Star’s Premier Classique (Montrachet), and Lalvin’s EC-1118. (I believe that Red Star’s Premier Cuvee is the exact same yeast as EC-1118, though some people claim that they are not exactly the same just very similar – regardless, I have not noticed a difference).
Myself, I continue to experiment with different yeasts in the ever fleeting desire to find the perfect yeast for my fruit wines. But I always keep coming back to these two. And really, it’s that I keep coming back to this one because the Montrachet yeast is as close to an all purpose yeast as I can find. It gives high quality results in a wide range of temperatures. It adds body without adding off-putting flavors. It works on reds, whites, rosés, and fruit wines. And it is a quick and reliable fermenter that gets the job done quickly and efficiently. If I were stranded on a deserted island and could only bring one yeast with me, I would bring the Montrachet yeast every single time. The EC-1118 is just as sturdy and reliable. It gets the job done quickly and efficiently with no off-putting flavors either. However, the EC-1118 is what they call a “neutral” yeast. That means that it doesn’t really add much of any flavor to the wine. But that’s not necessarily a good thing in most circumstances. Wine is, after all, a fermented food, and most wines benefit from good yeast flavors. So for this reason, I give Montrachet the advantage. That’s not to say that it’s the only yeast that would work for you. Everyone has their favorites, and I continually see ec-1118, d47, k1, and dv10 recommended to beginners, and you would likely love those yeasts too. But right now, I tell beginners that if they want a completely neutral yeast (there are times that is what you want), or if they have a stuck fermentation, to use EC-1118. Or if you are bottle fermenting a sparkling wine, use EC-1118. For all other situations, use Premier Classique (Montrachet).
9. I am just getting started. What do you think about wine “kits”? Would that be a good buy?
We need to clarify what is meant by “wine kits.” On the one hand, you might be talking about equipment kits. These are kits that come with most of the basic equipment (fermenting vessels, carboys, airlocks, etc) you would need to make wine, plus maybe a few of the chemicals that are routinely added to every wine (many chemicals will be part of recipe kits, though, because they are part of the ingredients of the wine, and some of them seem only to be sold a la carte). You can find an example of that kind of equipment kit here. These kinds of kits may be helpful, although they often leave out things that I personally believe are indispensable while including things that you may not need. But overall you may save some money, so I don’t really have a position on whether equipment kits are better or whether you should purchase equipment a la carte.
But I suspect that the question is actually about recipe kits. And the answer to that question is typically, “No! Don’t buy them.” Of course, we need to start by acknowledging that not all kits are the same. Some are just balanced juices (juices that contain the right balance of sugar, acid, tannins, etc.) I look favorably on these kinds of juices as a good easy option for beginning vintners. Others are more all-in-one kits that contain the juice plus certain other things that you will want to add to the juice like stabilizers, fining agents, and yeasts, with perhaps some bottle labels thrown in and the option to add oak chips or additional flavorings. Perhaps the most valuable part of the wine kit is the instruction booklet that they come with, especially for a beginner. Some of the kits come with skins, which really make a difference. Others are just buckets of frozen grapes. These tend to be cheaper and better quality, but require much more processing by the vintner, including, possibly, equipment that the beginning winemaker may not have at home (like grape presses!).
I normally make wine in 1 gallon batches, so I don’t really need something like a grape press. But if I were going to make larger batches, then I would want one. My general take on kits is that they are not really necessary and quite often wasteful. I very much dislike fining agents, so I let time clarify my wine. And I’m going to replace the yeast that they give me in the kit with my own yeast anyway. I am fully capable of designing my own wine labels. So there’s not much value to the wine kit, except perhaps the skins. So if I were to create a batch of red wine, I would very much want the skins. For white grape wines, you don’t really even want the skins so I would just buy the juices rather than the kits for white wines.
And even with the reds, the skins are good, but the frozen fruit is better. So I might start thinking I either want to buy enough for a small batch and just process it by hand, or else I might want to decide whether to buy a grape press. They are not terribly expensive. I routinely see them go for around $150 and sometimes you even find them for around the $100 mark. If a good wine kit with the skins is $199, but the bucket of frozen grapes comes in at $109 and a decent wine press comes in at $150, then it’s only about $60 more for frozen grapes and the press, and then the press is reusable so next time you won’t need to buy the press. To my mind, the economics of buying expensive wine kits just for the skins doesn’t really work out. And the economics of buying expensive kits when I really only need the juice (for white wines) also doesn’t work out. So my take on kits is, make your own using the things that you will actually use in your wine. Buy frozen (or dried!) fruit, or else if you want to go the easy route, just buy juice. Just realize that the juice option is a step down in the quality department, but juices can still make really good, enjoyable wines.
And keep in mind that grapes only became associated with wine as a result of a historical curiosity. That’s a subject for another day. But still, when you look beyond just grapes, a whole new world is opened up to you, and most fruits do not need a press, especially in small batches. A nylon bag is typically just fine for holding your fruit and the yeasts are more than capable of getting to the sugar. The point is that by looking beyond the grape, juices and frozen fruits and dried fruits become options for making fantastic wines often at a fraction of the cost of expensive grape wine kits.
10. What chemicals should I keep in stock to add to my wine?
Beyond Star San (which I already talked about), I keep two kinds of enzymes – pectic enzyme and amylase enzyme – in stock. I keep campden tablets in stock. I keep wine tannins in stock. And I keep three kinds of acids in stock (although, I tend to use one of the acids much more than the other two.) I also make sure to always have yeast nutrient in stock. I have a whole “yeast section” to my refrigerator. And I keep regular, granulated table sugar in my cupboard. I will use all of these on pretty much every brew. The enzymes are for keeping my wine clear (you will use a lot more pectic enzyme than amylase enzyme because fruits have much more pectin than starches). The campden tablets are for sanitizing your fruit and preserving your wine at bottling time. Few fruits have enough tannin, so I keep grape tannin powder (you can use tea bags though!) The acids are for getting the acidity balanced correctly: I have acid blend, tartaric acid, and citric acid – for the most part I only use acid blend, though, so you could get away with just buying acid blend. Citric acid is what I started with, because it’s much cheaper. Tartaric acid is primarily used to balance grape wines, but most of what I am making nowadays is non-grape fruit wine.
I do not tend to backsweeten because I prefer my wines dry or off dry. However, if I wanted to backsweeten, I would need wine stabilizers. There are two: potassium metabisulfite (the same thing that is in your campden tablets), and potassium sorbate. You need them both. Otherwise, you can just go ahead and use a non-fermentable sugar (xylitol, glycerine, or allulose). I think that is easier.
11. I am all ready to go. I just need to add my yeast to my must. But the package of yeast says that I need to rehydrate the yeast at 104 – 109 degrees for 15 minutes before adding it to the must. I don’t have a thermometer that I trust. Am I out of luck?
LOL. No. The short answer is no. You are not out of luck and you don’t ever really need to rehydrate your yeast. Just sprinkle it on top of your must. Try not to clump them, but instead ensure an even sprinkle on the top. Then close up and let them go to work. They are living creatures. Sugar is their food. They will wake up and find their food. You don’t need to stir them in or do anything, really, other than just sprinkle the yeast on the top.
This yeast rehydration myth – and that’s exactly what it is, a myth! – I call it the “back belt” of winemaking lore. It used to be common practice for businesses to require workers who had to lift moderate amounts of weight repetitively to wear a back belt. Even after scientific evidence came out that showed that back belts were counterproductive and actually led to more worker injuries, corporations still repeated the myth and kept policies requiring their workers to wear back belts. Why? Because the “common knowledge” that back belts “prevent worker injury” had worked its way deep into the mythos of these companies. It is similar with “yeast rehydration.” In actuality, it’s counterproductive to rehydrate your yeast. And yet, yeast manufacturers still recommend that you do it.
But if you think about it, it really makes no sense. Usually when you look at a yeast packet, it will give you a temperature range. That temperature range is often fairly narrow, something like 59 – 86 degrees. The yeast like it to be about the same temperature that you like it to be. Now, why exactly would a little yeast creature want to sit in a bowl of hot water that’s beyond its temperature range? Why would such hot water somehow “rehydrate” the yeast more than room temperature water? You’re going to be dropping the yeast into a big bucket of sugar water that has all the things that the yeast needs to survive: water and food and yeast nutrients. You’ve prepared this wonderful yeast paradise…so why would the yeast need to take a steam bath to avail itself of this paradise?
Does rehydrating hurt? If you follow the directions precisely, it probably doesn’t hurt much. Although 104 – 109 is too hot for the yeast, they won’t die immediately in these temperatures. So as long as you don’t exceed 109 and you don’t leave the yeast in for longer than 15 minutes, they will probably survive just fine. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s completely unnecessary to subject the yeast to that. It wastes your time, creates more work for you, exposes the yeast to the possibility that a mistake will be made that will kill them (what if you get it too hot accidentally?), and creates another unnecessary step in the process which potentially exposes your yeast to infectious agents. The water may not kill them after all, but what if there is a bacteria in that bowl that goes on to infect your wine? It’s not worth taking that risk since the rehydration step is not necessary.
Most yeast manufacturers will still tell you to rehydrate your yeast. I can tell you from a lot of experience that it’s not necessary. Those yeast will rehydrate themselves and start eating all those sugars and turning them to alcohol without it. If you want to follow the directions, no one is stopping you. But it’s completely unnecessary.
12. I want to get my sugar levels right for my must, but I don’t know how much sugar converts to how much alcohol. Do you know of a handy dandy little chart that allows such easy conversions?
Indeed I do. I made one myself.
13. I keep following your wine recipes, and the wines keep coming out very dry – not sweet at all. Aren’t fruit wines supposed to be sweet?
Good question! You can make each of these wines to your preferred level of sweetness by back sweetening. You simply add potassium metabisulfite and potassium sorbate (yes, you must add both!) to your wine. This stops the fermentation in its tracks. Then you can add however much sweetness you desire. If you don’t stop the fermentation in its tracks, then the yeast will typically continue to convert the sugar to alcohol until the wine is – once again – bone dry. Most wine yeasts will not stop fermenting until the wine is 15% or 16% or even 18% alcohol, which is probably way too high. So the practice is to ferment to dry, then add stabilizers, then backsweeten.
You could try to calculate exactly how much alcohol tolerance your yeast has, then add enough sugar to go beyond that from the beginning. So you could pick a wine yeast with relatively low tolerance – say Montrachet which has a 13% alcohol tolerance – and then just add enough sugar that once it had converted to 13% it would then leave behind the desired amount of residual sweetness. But we don’t typically do that because the alcohol tolerances aren’t exact. Wine yeasts routinely do go beyond their rated tolerance. You might end up with a dry 15% wine anyway.
So the short answer is that I do not know how sweet you like your wine, so I don’t try to give advice on backsweetening levels. But any of my dry wine recipes – and they are all dry wine recipes – can be backsweetened to the desired level of sweetness. But if you follow these recipes exactly without backsweetening, you will always get a dry wine. Myself, I prefer off-dry wines, so I don’t usually backsweeten or backsweeten only lightly. If you don’t have wine stabilizers, you can just use a non-fermentable sugar like xylitol or allulose. Frankly, that’s what I do. I don’t even stock wine stabilizer. I just use allulose.
14. Wine bottles are really expensive. I would like to reuse wine bottles, but I’m having a hard time getting the labels off. Do you know of an easy way to get the labels off of old wine bottles?
You are absolutely correct, wine bottles are obscenely expensive. If you don’t want to reuse wine bottles for some reason, you are better off going to a winery nearby and seeing if they will allow you to purchase some new wine bottles for wholesale pricing. A lot of wineries will sell you wine bottles at their cost. But it will always be cheaper to reuse wine bottles. If you don’t drink a lot of wine, you can probably get local bars and restaurants to give them to you or sell them for very cheap. They are just going to recycle them anyway and the price that recyclers pay for glass is on the order of something like $20 per ton, so used wine bottles are more of a nuisance to restaurants than anything. Sometimes recycling centers will also sell them to you for cheap.
Once you have a supply of used wine bottles, however, you have a new problem: those labels! As a hint, you can prevent this problem in the future by using Avery removable labels, so at least you will be able to easily peel off your own labels. Wineries and industrial winemakers, on the other hand, will not usually be so cooperative. They tend to use really strong adhesives that are extremely difficult to remove because, well, they don’t typically want their labels to come off easily. But that presents a problem for you: how to get a stubborn wine label off?
I wish that there was a trick that would work on every single wine bottle, but the fact is that they use different types of adhesives. A helpful trick is that a surprising number of wine labels are water soluble. You will see people online telling you to use things like dish detergent or vinegar or something else in your hot water soak, but this is really unnecessary. All you need is a hot water soak, you don’t need any chemical. If the glue is water soluble, then the hot water soak is all you need. And if the glue is not water soluble, then the Dawn dish detergents or vinegar additions won’t likely get it off either (at least, not at the diluted concentrations that people are using them at in the hot water soaks.) So there just isn’t much point to adding anything to your hot water soak.
About half the time or so, the hot water soak will be all you need to remove the label. (I have noticed that red wine labels tend to be easier to remove than white wine labels for some reason). If the glue is water soluble, then about a half hour long soak in hot water will be all it takes. The label, glue and all, will just slide right off with a butter knife or even just your thumb. I just removed a set of labels using only a 30 minute hot water soak and my thumbs. But with the remaining bottles, the paper part of the label will sort of crumble off after a hot water soak, but it will leave glue residue behind on your bottles. How do you get that off?
The glue will likely respond to either a strong acid or a strong base or something slick, plus mechanical action. There are also chemical solvents, but I would only use those as a last resort. I like to use a steel scouring pad or “scrubber.” Some people call it “steel wool” but it’s not steel wool. Steel wool would work, but it could also scratch the glass. This is a picture of the steel scouring pad that I would recommend.
On the other hand, steel wool looks like this, and it could very well scratch the glass:
Now, that you have your mechanical scrubber, you will want to use either an oil or an acid or a base on the bottle. Some people have reported good success with ordinary canola oil, but I’ve never really wanted to use canola oil because my hunch is that it would be very difficult to wash off the glass. But it might be an option. I like to start off with an acid – either my Star San bottle or vinegar. Spray it on the label and let it sit for a few minutes, then apply the steel scouring pad and see if it comes off. If it’s not coming off easily, rinse the bottle and then rub a wetted bar soap. It needs to really be soap, though, not these cleansing detergent bars because what you really want is something with lye in it. So just good old fashioned soap. Don’t use Dove (that’s got a pH of seven, which is basically water). If you want a cheap one and don’t have any real soap on hand, use Dr. Bronner’s which is available about everywhere. Lava soap is also available just about everywhere, and is even cheaper. Rub the wetted soap on the bottle and let it sit for a few minutes, then try your mechanical removal and see if it comes off easily.
After this point, your only options are solvents. You don’t use the steel scouring pad with the solvents. Instead, you apply a little solvent to a paper towel and rub over the bottle applying pressure to see if it is working. If it is working, you will know very quickly. You will feel some resistance of the paper on the bottle, followed by that resistance “giving” as the adhesive lifts off the bottle and onto the paper towel. If this doesn’t start to work within a few seconds, then it’s not going to work. One of the following solvents will almost certainly work: isopropyl alcohol, acetone (nail polish remover), mineral spirits, orange oil, Goo Gone. I am told that Goo Gone will always work, and that you only need a very tiny amount, so a bottle of Goo Gone might be a good investment (about $5 for 8 ounces). I would wear gloves while using it, though. Other than the isopropyl alcohol (and the orange oil), most of these solvents are extremely harsh chemicals, so you would want to wear gloves and make sure that the wine bottles are washed thoroughly afterwards. Honestly, if the isopropyl alcohol doesn’t work, I usually tend to just give up on the bottle. But I am excited about orange oil (d-limonene). I have never used it, but others have reported that it works very well and is relatively non-toxic (although still caustic enough that you probably want to wear gloves). It is a concentrated extract of orange peel. So I will probably buy a little and give it a chance.
