Photo Credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times When in conversation about wine, often “body” is mentioned. If you go to a wine tasting, noting the body of a wine is common practice. But what is meant by body when referring to a wine? Well, simply put, it’s how a wine feels in your mouth. When [...]
Photo Credit: unknown There are several readers of Wine Press Blogger who are into home winemaking and very often I receive the same question in emails: Where can I buy empty wine bottles? So, I did some research and discovered a few places. I presume you already know how many you need. If not, figure [...]
There is one simple equation in life that every wine lover must know: without sugar there is no alcohol. As previously mentioned in several posts, it takes sugar to make the alcohol that so many of us love and quite possibly live for. And thankfully wine grapes have plenty of it. The sugar in wine [...]
Six acids make up the primary acids used in the wine making process. They have a direct influence on the taste, color and acidity level of the resulting wine. Three of the acids in wine are found within the grapes themselves and three come from the yeasts most often used during fermentation. In the grape [...]
Continuing down the road of fortified wine production I wanted to go over Madeira wine production in this post. You don’t really see much info on Madeira but it is a fine fortified wine when you’re not staring any of the various bottles of cheap cooking wine. If you’d like to read about the various [...]
Cont’d from Port Wine Production Part 1 Port wine traditionally matures in casks called pipes between one and two winter seasons in the wineries of the Douro. It then goes to the city of Vila Nova de Gaia, whose humid air is perfect for aging and maturing wines and causes very little to evaporate. While [...]
Now that the production of Sherry has had time to sink in I want to go into Port wine production. But, in case you missed it, you can click the link for Sherry Production Part 1, which discusses the types of grapes used to make Sherry, how the grapes are crushed and what goes into [...]
cont’d from Sherry Production Part 1. Let’s move right in to the classification of Sherry and fortification. Once the juice has fermented, tasters come in to classify the Sherry as either Fino or Oloroso. If one or two lots cannot be determined they are marked mosto sobretablas which means undecided. These wines are left to [...]
Sherry Production will be our first discussion in our series learn about fortified wines. I’ve already covered the different styles of Sherry, so if you would like more information on that you can read my post entitled Jerez My Sherry Wine. Sherry wine is a fortified wine that was brought to the port of Cádiz [...]
Learn About Sparkling Wine Production If you missed the first part of this post, you can Learn About Sparkling Wine Production from the beginning by clicking the link. The last thing we talked about was the Champagne press and the different stages of pressing. Now let’s get into primary fermentation. Primary Fermentation and Assemblage Once [...]
Learn About Sparkling Wine Production It still makes me chuckle when I overhear certain types of people talk about wine. People who obviously know nothing about it, but who have read an article in Wine Spectator and have suddenly become experts on a subject. Let me explain. As a wine expert myself, (stop laughing) I [...]
Learn About Wine Production Continuing with step three of red wine making, let’s learn about Pressing, Secondary Fermentation and Clarification in red wine production. Largely today, red wines are pressed either slightly before fermentation finishes or when the wine reaches its intended dryness level. Pressing enables all the juice to be extracted while allowing solids [...]
Learn About Wine Production Making red wine is more or less the same process as making white wine, but with some slight variations. For one, skins are kept in contact with the juice during fermentation until the desired color of the wine is reached. Grape skins, it turns out, contain enough dye to give red [...]
Ok, here we are at the last of the Learn About White Wine Production series. If you missed the other posts, we talked about crushing and pressing the grape clusters, prepping and settling the wine must, acidification and chaptalization. Then we went into primary and secondary fermentation, racking, sur lie aging, Bâttonage, and sulfur adjustment [...]
Let’s continue to learn about white wine production, shall we? If you missed the first part of this series you can find it here: Learn About White Wine Production: Part I On to Primary Fermentation. Once the wine must is prepped, settled, acidified and/or chaptalized, it is ready for fermentation. It is typical today for [...]
Learn About White Wine Production If you’ve been following along as I relate everything you need to learn about wine online, you may have noticed the recent excessive bold text lately. Simple reason, Bolding certain words seems to make me rank higher for the keyword phrase learn about wine. This is something I learned from [...]
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