Wine kit water

I am trying a wine kit for the first time and from searching the site am unable to find a confirmed answer on what type of water I should be using. I know with beer I have had success running tap water through a charcoal filter. With wine, since it is not being boiled, is it best to purchase something like distilled or RO water from the store? Any advice is appreciated - thanks!

If you have a lot of clorine in your tap water, just let it sit for 24 hours prior to adding it to your kit. I use city tap water, but it has a lot of clorine so got a really fancy filter system for the whole house.

A Brita can do wonderful things to your wine water.

My general rule is if you will drink it right from the tap then go ahead and use it. Like mentioned before if there is a lot of chlorine then let it sit over night. When in doubt I would use spring water. I don't drink the water from my tap so I go the spring water direction and have had no problems.

You can use any water you like except distilled water I've heard. Distilled water doesn't have the minerals the yeast need. I use tap or sometimes I buy gallon jugs of "spring" water.
I don't know about reverse osmois <sp> water.

I only use distilled water. The kit must (or concentrate) has all of the minerals needed to make it taste great. The minerals and chemicals in tap water are actually BAD for yeast. Chlorine and fluoride are bad news.

Also. All minerality should come from the grapes. I am sure you have all heard the term teroir.

Hi,


I'm a virgin wine-maker planning his first 3-5 gallon batch sometime this week. Though there seems to be some debate on the topic, I know from my relatively brief foray into brewing these past 2 years that different mineral profiles will invariably alter the character of a beer. What I don't understand is how this principle can't or doesn't also apply to winemaking? Wouldn't using local tap water, in addition to potentially stalling fermentation and imparting off flavors, introduce unwanted variability to a wine recipe, making attempts to replicate the recipe in other locations with different chlorine/bicarbonate/mineral profiles difficult, if not impossible?


So...I was wondering. Does anyone know if there is a "standard" profile that professional winemakers utilize to mimic the waters found in, let's say, champagne, burgundy, etc? Or is the argument, as WIP pointed out, that wine musts get all necessary minerals/water from the fruits and only the fruits? How did they do it in the 'old days' when distillation was not accessible to the average winemaker? Did they even dilute the fruit with water or just ferment directly from freshly squeezed grape juice?



-A.

There are different schools of thought. When making wine the classic way these are the steps.

1- harvest grapes (after good farming practices of course)
[crush grapes]
2- ferment grapes (quite a bit in between)

3- press grapes (before the ferment if creating a white after for a red)

4- barrel the wine

5- blend the wine (different yeasts, lots, even barrel profiles)

6- bottle wine

7- sell wine, or drink wine

Now with home brew kits these are the steps.

1- harvest grapes

2- crush grapes

3- let grapes sit on skins

4- press grapes

5- concentrate juice

6- prepare and package must

7- sell to consumer

8- consumer does the rest

In this situation, the only thing they are doing to change the first process is to distill the water out. So, what you do is add distilled water to make it what it was before they concentrated it.

So I would say to either use distilled water (my preference) or filtered water which I also use on lesser wines (skeeter pee, and other home stuff. Not professionally)

In the winery, I NEVER use anything but distilled water. I don't want tap water variables touching my wine in that situation.