WineMaking FAQ

Covers various aspects of home winemaking, including techniques, tips, equipment, possible ingredients, various types of wine, maturity tips, and trouble shooting.

This is the FAQ for rec.crafts.winemaking. If you have any additions, deletions, corrections, comments, questions or the like, please direct them to r.c.w. or Don Buchan at malak&pobox.com.

Copyright notice:

Copyright 1995-1999 by Don Buchan, all rights reserved. This FAQ may be distributed to any USENET newsgroup, on-line service, BBS or any other means, electronic or physical (such as, but not limited to, floppy diskettes and printouts) as long as:

A) it is distributed in its entirety, B) no fee is charged to anyone: i) downloading this file beyond nominal online fees, or ii) receiving the information beyond nominal format charges, C) it is not distributed for financial gain. To be included in commercial collections or compilations (except online services as allowed above), express permission from Don Buchan (malak&pobox.com) (&=@) must be obtained.

I have granted permission to Better Winemaking by Cybercom Publications to print excepts from this document. I only receive a free copy of the magazine, and have donated the value of the yearly subscription fee to my church's Minister's Discretionary Fund.

Academic or professional use and accuracy:

In the case of academic use, follow the guidelines set out at your institution for referencing electronic texts, provided that my name, Don Buchan, and email ID, malak&pobox.com (&=@), are referenced as editor/compilor. I suggest as title "FAQ List for Usenet Usegroup rec.crafts.winemaking". An essay on suggested referencing guidelines is available at http://clever.net/quinion/words/citation.htm or by email from michael&quinion.demon.co.uk (&=@)

I am not an oenologist, nor is this text guaranteed to be 100% accurate. No liability or warranty, express or implied, is assumed by the editor or contributors. If you see an error, please send it to malak&pobox.com (&=@)

This text covers the actual procedures of making wine to varying degrees, as well as various approaches, techniques, and philosophies about winemaking. These are sometimes going to contradict each other -- remember, different people wrote various sections. While the editor has made an effort to bring the whole thing together, these contradictions were left in to allow for the numorous methods of reaching the same goal: Good to better to even great wine. The caveat to all this? Read the whole document as much as possible. There are various sections that contain loads of information that perhaps in and of themselves perhaps are better contained in other sections but are left where they are.

If you want more information of a basic nature, request the primers mentioned in the NET RESOURCES posting for wine & winemaking.

Editing & spelling conventions:

The editor has tried to edit for brevity in some cases, therefore contributions may be shorter than submitted or as originally posted in the newsgroup. When used, the word "I" is the contributor, not necessarily the editor. Text in {} is the original question.

British (and Canadian) spelling conventions are used.

Measurement conventions:

An attempt has been made to include imperial, American and metric measurements.

When a reference to a gallon is made, it will be identified as an imperial or American gallon, and its equivalent in the other size is made as well in litres. In this text, a gallon of wine is usually an imperial gallon (4.5 L, 1.19 USG) and a gallon jug is usually 1.06 USG (4 L, 0.89 imp. gal.).

Credits

Troubleshooting -- Can be found in the seperate posting TROUBLESHOOTING for wine & winemaking

Net Resources -- Can be found in the seperate posting NET RESOURCES for wine & winemaking.