Common Winemaking Mistakes

today on the home wine making channel we've got a really exciting episode and we're going to talk about some common wine making mistakes as we're coming into the wine making season a lot of you guys are probably firing up some wines and you're thinking man i hope i don't forget to do something i hope i don't do something wrong and ruin all this hard work so i thought let's put together some some things that i think are good things to keep in the back your mind so you don't mess them up something mistakes i've made in the past some mistakes a lot of i know you guys have made in the past and let's try to refresh it before we go into this uh winemaking season if you guys have made any of these mistakes or ones that i have not mentioned here please mention the comments i love to hear from you guys and i think it's cool that we can all kind of share experiences together the first thing on my list this is such a common thing i hear from people that just get into wine i remember when i first got into wine people would tell me this that you have to rack the wine a bunch of times and that the the better the more the rack the more times you've racked that wine the better the quality so you hear people say oh yeah i racked this wine 10 times check out how good it is well that is that couldn't be further from the truth every time you rack that wine you're introducing oxygen to it it's not that the wine doesn't need to be racked and when i say racked i mean siphoned off of the things that settle out in that carboy or the leaves but it really shouldn't be racked more than it needs to if you're making a white wine for instance you'll usually crush and press those grapes let it settle and rack it off that stuff that settles out and ferment it you'll probably rack it at the end of fermentation and you'll be lucky if you need to rack it one more time beyond that red wine is going to be a similar case you're going to ferment usually on the skins unless you're making a red wine from a juice which definitely recommend making a red wine from grapes get that skin contact time if you want to make a good premium red wine but after you press after fermentation all this stuff settles out it's called the gross leaves as opposed to the fine lease you want to rack off that after about 24 maybe 36 hours and then you go into malolactic fermentation you you'll probably rack at the end of malolactic fermentation it just depends on how much settles out of that wine and then at most again maybe one more rack so in general we're looking at two to three rackings per wine and my general rule of thumb is if the sediment or the leaves are above about you know 3 8 of an inch to a half inch in height at the bottom of that carboy then i like to rack it unless you're doing something unique like you're intentionally aging on the lease but we can go ahead and say racking 17 times i don't see any scenario where that's something i would recommend doing next is headspace management so there's a few things you can really mess up when it comes to headspace and what i mean there is the amount of space above the wine in your vessel this could be a carboy it could be a barrel could be a fermenter but usually what i'm talking about here is a carboy the first way you can kind of mess this up is if you're fermenting a white wine which i firm i commonly will ferment in a carboy you often might think i'll just like fill it right up to the top well that wine can get a little crazy and vigorous when it gets going so if you feel all the way up to the top it's not unheard of for that wine to kind of start to spew over the top especially if you start to make some additions like nutrient addition so you always want to leave a little bit of head space i usually like to leave about a fifth of the container volume of head space you can do do a little bit more than that i don't like to go too much less than that though you can also have too much head space and when i say this i mean more during the aging period of that wine so a young wine that's actively fermenting can consume a huge amount of oxygen that yeast loves oxygen and it'll eat it right up you're not going to oxidize a wine that's actively fermenting but when you get into that aging period the wine really does not want oxygen i mean a little teeny bit there's something called microoxidation can help smooth things out over time but we are talking very very very little amounts of oxygen that you want during that aging period so what you would do is top up that carboy to the neck so you only want about an inch of head space above the neck of that or above the top of that wine where you've got your wine and your airlock and that just kind of helps to prevent oxidation you don't have all this surface area like you have when you have you know a not topped up carboy and you've got a lot of air space there i see some people this is kind of along the same lines i won't call this its own thing but everyone's into these big mouth bubbler things i think it's when home brewers in the beer scene come into wine making they're like yeah i want this huge like top on my car boy and then i have it's easier to clean it's better but really the car boy with the tiny neck is just a great aging vessel when you go away from that you get into these big necks it works okay as a fermenter but i wouldn't use that to age a wine these small volumes are really really vulnerable to oxidation because it's just easy to dissolve a lot of oxygen into it compared to you know a thousand gallon batch in a winery where they've got this massive amount of wine and just a little bit of oxygen above it next would be along the lines of again oxygen management but more during fermentation i mentioned that yeast can consume a lot of oxygen well during fermentation you're really looking for this equilibrium of too little and too much oxygen and it is hard to have too much oxygen during fermentation but it's really really easy to have too little oxygen especially with some of these yeasts that are really oxygen and nitrogen hungry so if you don't intentionally allow a little bit of oxygen to that wine during fermentation what will happen is it'll lean reductive so reductive is kind of the opposite of oxidized and when a wine starts to lean a little too reductive that's when you get these smells like rotten egg sulfur hydrogen sulfide smells and if that goes untreated it can turn into mercaptan which is more of this burnt rubber characteristic in a wine that is virtually impossible to eliminate once you get to that stage if you do find that you're you're down here sniffing your wines daily which i recommend during fermentation and you catch a little whiff of that sulfur hydrogen sulfide i'd recommend splashing it up intentionally giving that wine a lot of air and it's also an indication that you might be a little bit low on nitrogen so you might want to give it a little bit of yeast nutrient and it could also be an indication that you're drifting out of the safe temperature range for that yeast to work within so you might want to modify the fermentation temperature a little bit next will be something that i think a lot of home wine makers did when they first started especially if they were like 21 years old when they started making wine and that is you get your packet of ec1118 yeast which is the yeast that we all started with and it says ferments up to 18 alcohol and then you're looking at your hydrometer and it has this alcohol scale and depending on how much sugar you put in that must will depend on how much alcohol it makes well naturally as a 21 year old you say well absolutely i want to make 18 alcohol so you make all these wines you're making a peach wine you're making a strawberry wine these wines that cannot handle that kind of alcohol without tasting like ethanol plus fruit you're making 18 alcohol with those and i just if you really want to improve your wines just don't do that if you want that much alcohol make twice as much wine don't add twice as much sugar a more advanced problem that you'll have once you get to the point where you're really managing acids in wine so you might have a ph meter and you're thinking oh man i gotta add a little acid i gotta neutralize a little bit of acid an issue you might run into is over correction so you're thinking you need to add a little bit of tartaric acid and you just add the exact amount you think you need based on some recommendation on the packet and you overshoot the target and now you're stuck you're like now i've got to add potassium bicarbonate and swing it back and you overshoot again you don't want to do that but it's something that we've all probably done when we first started managing acids in wine what you really want to do is sneak up on it i'll usually add about half of what i think i need when it comes to adding acids or things like potassium bicarbonate to swing things the other way and the reason i don't add the number that it says on the packet or the number that some calculation says is because each wine can react substantially different i mean way different and the reason for that is it's really complicated it's not just a simple solution of tartaric acid and water that you're dealing with you have things like potassium in there you have acid buffers and you don't know how much of those buffers are in there and until you know how that wine is going to react to those additions you want to kind of go a little bit light on it and it's not that big a deal you can kind of over the space of a fermentation get those numbers to where you want them to be by the time you're at the end along the line of acids i see this shockingly common especially when you're getting grapes from a warm climate like central valley california these big farmed grapes is these runaway ph's so people will get a wine in and or a grapes in and they'll crush them and they'll find that their ph is already 3.8 and at 3.8 now you ferment it it's going to climb to something like 4.0 there's probably hardly any malic acid in these grapes but if there is it's going to climb even higher now you've got a wine at a ph of something like 4.1 that wine is number one way out of balance most likely it's going to need a ton of tannin to offset that low acid and it's also really really vulnerable to spoilage unless you're a really experienced wine maker a wine at a ph of 4.1 will spoil like that you'll have a film on it and then you'll be messaging me about hey i've got this film on my wine how do i fix it so hopefully you're just getting grapes that aren't in that situation but when you are i usually like to correct it down to about the range of 3.6 so if you look at the dis association constants of tartaric acid the clo 3.6 is right in the middle of the two constants so the higher above 3.6 you are the more it's going to want to run up on you and if you get way below 3.6 it actually will want to run down on you if you are dropping out potassium bitartrate by cold stabilizing and things like that so i don't want to correct it insane amounts but for a red wine i usually like to be around that 3.6 ish range for a white wine i like to be 3.1 3.2 when i start a fermentation now another thing i often wonder when someone says hey my white wine is has a ph of 2.5 is is that ph meter calibrated you really really want to have some ph buffer some 4.0 and 7.0 buffer to calibrate that ph meter especially when you're starting to question things like this because you don't want to make an adjustment only to find that the wine was totally fine your ph meter was the problem next this is a total rookie move that again we've probably all done and it is having corks blowing off of bottles because the wine wasn't stable when it went into bottle if you want to bottle a wine with residual sugar you really need to somehow assure that there's no yeast in there or virtually zero yeast in there or that you somehow stabilized it and the home the best way to stabilize a wine at home is going to be to use potassium sorbate so this is also sorbic acid it's found naturally in some fruits but what it does is it coats a yeast cell and prevents it from budding or creating new yeast cells because all it takes is a few cells to bloom into a larger population of yeast that can actually ferment that wine you can still screw this up though so if you add the potassium sorbate and the wine isn't crystal clear at the time of addition there might just be enough yeast in that wine to keep fermenting even without it blooming into a larger population you could also sterile filter the wine but the home filtration solutions really just are not quite to the level of you know sterile to confidently bottle a wine by sterile filtering at home a lot of wineries will use something called dimethyl dicarbonate which kills the yeast and then breaks down into carbon dioxide and methanol minuscule amount of methanol and no one wants to hear that but that's a thing that happens it's also not particularly harmful all wines have a minuscule bit of methanol in them if you know anybody that's into distilling they just make sure they pull that stuff off and separate it from the final batches of of um whiskey or whatever they're making this is going to be this next thing is going to be something i think is really plagues the wine making even professional industry but especially home wire makers and it's going to be misdiagnosing a problem and the most common misdiagnosis is going to be oh i must not have cleaned my equipment enough i better clean my wine press better i better clean my crusher better i better clean my racking cane better and i'm not promoting that you should be using disgusting really filthy equipment but the reality is you're bringing these grapes in off of a vineyard they're coming in with bugs on them they're coming in with bird poop on them and they're not sterilized it's not like home brewing where you have this boiling thing that's sterilizing that that um wart no we're working with live stuff there is bacteria in there there are wild yeasts in there and it's up to us to learn how to manage that you're managing biology you can clean your your crusher de-stemmer as much as you want but it's not going to stop the fact that that piece of bird poop went through there so just recognize that wine making is probably more has more in common with gardening than it does with cooking you're not really recipe following you're kind of watching you're seeing what's happening and you're trying to be proactive but sometimes you're also reacting to things that you're seeing if you see a bunch of spots on the leaves in your garden you don't have to go out and start washing the dirt more of your garden you probably have some sort of spray that you need to spray to take care of whatever that fungus is that's causing those spots and if you don't do anything usually you might not have a garden left if the deer are eating your garden you're saying you know what i want to go i don't want to do anything i'll just let the garden do its thing well the deer are going to eat the whole garden it's going to be gone so it's really good to learn about what's really happening at a at a you know microbial scale here and and it's not that difficult you just need to put a little bit of effort into it for the most part yeast is the most competitive thing that wants to eat the sugars in that wine so wine or juice does want to turn into wine but sometimes it can go a little bit off course on its way there and in worst case scenario it might go so far off course that it's really not good wine anymore a lot of new wine makers i think you you go browsing the pages of these wine making supply shops and you're like oh yeah i need oak i need all this stuff and you just want to add oak to everything well don't there's wines that pair well with oak most red wines can take oak and it can be complementary but like some of these white wines i make if you're making like a concord wine a really fruity wine oak is probably not something that you're going to want to add to that wine now sure go ahead and do all this experimentation but you might want to do a side by side if you're going to do something way off the beaten path and see do i really like the one with oak better than one without oak most white wines though i won't oak there's few exceptions things like chardonnay can take some oak and still be pretty good but most the time you want this crisp clean white wine and then kind of along those same lines would be you get some free grapes and you have a wine that might be your favorite wine so maybe you really love syrah or something but you've got some free concord grapes and you're like i want to make this dry oaked wine and it's going to be just like this syrah it's not there's grapes that you kind of want to make the best wine that you can with those grapes if i got some free concord grapes the one i'm probably gonna make is probably this people pleaser it's kind of tastes like welch's grape juice but it's a wine if i get some cabernet sauvignon i'm not gonna probably try to make this really juicy juice bomb i'm actually gonna make a real dry bold red wine you really want to try to get the right grapes for the wine that you're making and this also goes for fruit i mean you're probably not going to make a oaky strawberry or peach wine i know there are a ton of more mistakes you can make a lot of them end in big messes all over the floor if like i said if you've had any of these mistakes be sure to mention in the comments and if you want to support the home wine making more and get access to some more uh information like this be sure to check out my patreon page patreon.com make wine and you can also swing by my website smartwinemaking.com thanks for watching

Channel: The Home Winemaking Channel

Views: 217,847

Keywords: Wine, winemaking, home winemaking, winery, wine making, DIY, mistakes, Mess ups, fails

Id: ttLTWMorPYI

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021