I make wine in a low-intervention style — only native ferment, no sulfur unless it's necessary, nothing else but a love of wine and sound judgment. Mouse stories haunt this style, but I'd never had a problem until a June bottling.

100% Carignan, ~60% stems, fermented in a 700L amphora, then backfilled and sealed for 7 months. Pulled it out, pressed to neutral oak for two months — free-run to one barrel, press wine to the other. The press barrel tasted so good over several weeks that we called it a summer wine — medium-light, fruity, chillable, dusty/earthy backbone — and bottled it. It was clean out of the barrel, but two days in bottle and a hint of mouse. Two weeks later: undrinkable.

I figured the whole bottling was shot. Every bottle I opened for two months was unpalatably mousy, so I set them aside to try one at six months. You hear the Beaujolais line that mouse vanishes after a year, but you hear far more winemakers and drinkers say a mousy bottle is trash, period — and the science, if anything, leans pessimistic, since the mouse compounds are fairly stable. So I wasn't hopeful.

Three months in, a friend opened one and texted that it was clean, actually beautiful. I opened one and confirmed it: full garrigue array, black cherry, amphora-earthy, and a delightful emergent black olive note that's just fantastic. No mouse. I left a bottle open two hours — nothing. A friend left one open 24 hours — nothing. Whatever it was, it's now undetectable, even under O2 stress.

I'm not claiming the compounds are gone — I can't tell from the glass whether they actually degraded or are just sitting below threshold now. But something in this wine went from undrinkable to lovely with nothing but time in bottle. Has anyone else watched a mousy wine clean itself up like this? And if you know the chemistry — is this real degradation of the compounds, or binding/masking that could come back to haunt me?

I was thinking of buying an oak barrel around 20L capacity to try barrel aging. In my research I saw some claiming that you basically can use it 4 times and after that you're getting marginal benefits. Is that true? Is there a way to recondition a barrel to improve that?

I have been making wine at home for about 6 months now and like working with kits.

I am planning to start the Winexpert Private Reserve Zinfandel tomorrow.

Does anyone have any tips to improve on the kit? I was considering changing the yeast to something other than Ec-1118.

Looking to find an efficient and effective way to clean barrels pre fill. I have a steamer, OZone, and pressure washer barrel attachment. Looking to keep time to a minimum.

Sauvignon Blanc available in Oakland for pickup today. From a great RRV vineyard (that messed up and doubled the order).

My, now annual, August Blend is usually whatever fresh fruit I have access to towards the end of the summer. This year it is mostly gravenstein apples, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, and the leftovers of a carton of cotton candy grapes. So far so good. 6 gallons and my biggest venture yet! It’s clarifying now as it settles in the carboy but the opaque pepto bubblegum look is kinda fun. My tip for apples is to use fruit bags. Straining liquid out of essentially settled applesauce took way too long and I’m sure the extra oxygen didn’t help things, but it is what it is.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been a home winemaker for about 15 years, making everything from Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and Malbec to fruit wines such as banana, blueberry, pineapple and even coffee wine.

Over the years I’ve used notes, spreadsheets and other ways of keeping track of my wines, but I wanted something that did more than simply log what I did. That eventually led me to start building WineMaker’s Journey around the way I actually make and keep track of my own wines.

The idea is to follow the entire journey of a wine—from the day you start a batch to the bottles you eventually enjoy and share.

WineMaker’s Journey lets you:

• Create and manage individual wine projects and vintages
• Track fermentation progress and lab readings such as specific gravity, pH and other measurements
• Record additions, rackings and other winemaking activities
• Follow important milestones throughout the life of the wine
• Add photos as the wine progresses
• Track bottle inventory after bottling, including different bottle sizes
• Record bottles that you've opened or shared with friends and family
• Add tasting notes and ratings as the wine develops in the bottle
• View the history of the wine as a journey rather than just a collection of log entries

I’m now looking for a small group of actual home winemakers who would be willing to test the app while making and managing their own wines.

I have versions available for both iPhone/iPad and Android, and there is no cost to participate in the testing.

I’m not looking for people to simply download it and tell me it looks good. 😄 I’d really like fellow winemakers to put it through its paces—create real projects, enter readings and activities, track bottles, and tell me what works, what’s confusing, what breaks, and especially what you think is missing.

Beginners are welcome too. In fact, feedback from both new and experienced winemakers would be extremely valuable.

If you're interested, leave a comment or send me a message and let me know:

iPhone/iPad or Android, and what kind of wine you typically make.

Thanks, and cheers! 🍷

This vintage will be legendary with the drought and all in Europe. The harvest was on August 29. this past Saturday, sugar is close to 24°Brix, 1.100 specific gravity precisely. This will definitely be a darker Pinot, with 14 - 14.5% abv.

I've got this white stuff at the bottom of my wine but none on the top of the must, is it mold of just sediment

8 days out and I found these berries floating towards the top. Bit worried about mold with the white stuff. If it is not should I rack now to be preventative? Reading at just above 1.000 and planning to rack anyways in a couple of days if it holds stable.

I’m an absolute newbie here. I happen to have a ton of gooseberries grown in my home this year. And I wanted to make some wine out of it. It will be my first ever time trying it. Need a good, reliable recipe, and any advices that would help me nail it down.

Thanks in advance.

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Just bottled my first wine🥳 It is a blueberry and rhubarb wine. Didn't have any other problems except that a little bit of the lees got into some of them, but thats fine. One question I have is that is it normal for the cork to be dented like this? I put them in some lukewarm water while I was putting the wine into the bottles.

Don't think we got the best from the amount of grape. Got it in the tank with cooling plates set at around 5°C. Kept chilled at about 11 °C for 20 hours. Then had a pipe leave the chiller while at work. Got home it was at 19. Chucked ice in the chiller and stabilised it at fermentston to 16°C. Now running for 2 days fermenting at this temp. Sugar turing to alcohol from reading so still getting away with it. But hey, wine is a yeasty lityle bstard. 😄

How hard / or expensive will it be to get something like this made?

Calera clone Pinot Noir, SC Mountains

My third season of winemaking – greengage plum wine 🍷

Last week I harvested the last of my greengage plums — about 3.5 kg in total. I added 2 litres of water, pectic enzyme, 500 g of sugar and yeast.

Today I racked the wine into a clean carboy (pictured) and added another 200 g of sugar. I’m hoping to end up with a semi-sweet wine.

This is my third season of winemaking and I’m having a lot of fun with it! I always try to use fruit that I’ve grown myself or gathered from the forest.

Unfortunately, I live in a mountainous area, so grapes aren’t really a realistic primary ingredient for me. 😄 That’s why I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of fruit wines instead.

Are there any other fruit-wine enthusiasts here? What are your favourite fruits to work with? 🍒🍎🫐

We’re a 75+ acre orchard in MA with a small vintage cider program. We pick, press, ferment, blend, and package on premise.

We’ve been floating the idea of filming a couple of blocks through a full year (prune, bloom, thin, pick, press, ferment, bottle) and tying that footage to the vintage. We don’t do much social and don’t have anyone who can shoot or edit. YouTube is the main place we’d put it.

Has anyone here done something similar? Lessons, dos and don’ts, or things you’d skip if you did it again?

My 2025 wine batch now has nine months, tastes great and has become something that I can’t believe I have succeeded doing as a first timer. Now, I want to bottle everything up and give most of it away.

What’s the deal with labels?
What do you guys do? Online? At home?
I expect to have about 50-70 bottles.
I would like a decent quality inexpensive idea for less than 100 bucks for all.

Thanks.

Home winemaker who recently moved from the Midwest to the east coast and hoping to find a Vineyard that is selling grapes this season.

Also open to going in on large order with a group if opportunity presents itself

So brewed up a batch of Beaverdale Pinot Grigio, I skipped the final stage of adding the stabiliser so as to not kill of the yeast, but did add the first set of finings. (I honestly forgot to add the second set). It ended up crystal clear though at approx 12%.

Bottled into 500ml crown cap bottles with 2 carbonation drops per bottle, now a month later there is no fizz.

I've opened a few of them to quickly add a small sprinkling of EV-1118 to see if I can kick off a secondary bottle fermentation, but so far the extra yeast seems to have just sunk and has remained inactive.

Any suggestions on how I can get the bottle fermentation to start up.
I've brewed cider & beer with the same technique and all have had a great carbonation.

So do I need to add even more sugar (loath to do so in case I get bottle bombs)

The final ABV is easily below any yeast tolerance.

23brix. 5litres of juice i'd estimate. 80 bunches picked, 40 are whole stem in there. RC212 yeast to add tomorrow. Wish me luck.

I’m building a beverage operations platform called CatOps, and I’m looking for some brutally practical feedback from people who actually work in wineries, breweries, distilleries, cideries, meaderies, and other beverage production facilities.

I work in beverage manufacturing myself, and CatOps originally started because I kept running into processes that were being managed through a combination of spreadsheets, paper records, disconnected software, and tribal knowledge.
The goal isn’t to build another generic ERP with 500 features nobody uses, I want to build the things operators, production managers, warehouse teams, compliance people, and owners genuinely wish they had.

Right now CatOps includes, or is actively being built around, things like:

• Raw material & packaging inventory — lot tracking, locations, FIFO, receiving, transfers, adjustments, QR codes, etc.
• Production/batch records — ingredients used, actual vs. planned quantities, lot traceability, yields, losses, timestamps, operator records, approvals, and production history.
• Fermentation tracking — designed to follow a fermentation from initial setup through completion, including things like gravity/Brix, temperature, pH, additions, yeast, nutrients, observations, transfers, and fermentation events.
• Finished goods inventory and production/bottling records.
• Lot traceability from incoming ingredients all the way through finished product.
• Warehousing & location management.
• Production planning/scheduling with upcoming jobs and a 30-day production schedule.
• Cost tracking / COGS and production yield information.
• Audit trails showing who changed what and when.
• Role-based access for operators, managers, administrators, etc.
• Customer/brand management for contract producers and co-packers handling multiple brands.
• Compliance-focused records and reporting, with the long-term goal of making TTB reporting significantly less painful for alcohol producers.
• Support for operations that deal with beer, wine, spirits, RTDs and other beverage types, rather than forcing everyone into the same production workflow.

There are a lot of other things on the roadmap, but before I keep adding features I’d really like to hear from people actually doing this every day.

If you could wave a magic wand and add one feature to the software you use at your facility, what would it be?

It could be something big, but I’m especially interested in the annoying little things:

“What I really wish it would automatically calculate is…”
“I hate having to enter this information twice…”
“We still use a spreadsheet for ___ because our software sucks at it…”
“I wish production could see ___ without calling the office…”
“Tracking ___ is an absolute nightmare…”
“What would save me several hours every week is…”

I’m also interested in things that existing brewery/winery/distillery software does poorly, not just features that are completely missing.

I’m not looking for anyone to buy anything here. I’m trying to collect real-world feedback while I’m still at the stage where I can actually change how the system works.

Does this picture resemble mold or could it just be yeast? First time making wine and definitely made some mistakes along the way. See below for details (also I tried to use the vocab to the best of my ability to be as accurate as possible).

My hydrometer read a stable reading (.992 SG) for days before the second racking so I didn’t expect there to be yeast / fermentation left. Equipment was sanitized thoroughly with Star San and I also added a campden tablet at this moment.

For context, I ended up topping my wine jug (with a dry 12% box wine) after the second racking because there was a lot of headspace. Completely changed the color from the original wine but I was worried about the carboy air gap or introducing a lot of oxygen when fermentation had stopped.

Picture 1: Present day, photo of concern
Picture 2: Few days after second racking
Picture 3: Original wine before topping up headspace

As the title says I'm looking to make a rootbeer inspired mead , I was recently gifted a little under 1 oz of dried sassafras root bark and I wanted to try making a rootbeer inspired mead/wine . Does 1 oz sound like enough for about 1 gallon , or do yall have any suggestions, honestly I have never worked with it before and I'm not sure what I'm doing with it .(I'm aware of the potential health issues it can cause in excessive quantities and I'm willing to take that risk lol)