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These arsenic scares seem to get recycled every few years. Here is a 2016 article from a UC Davis prof that puts the 10ppb arsenic threshold in context. Basically, he says unless you are knocking back an entire bottle of wine daily containing elevated arsenic levels, you are not at risk for...

I've made a lot of blackberry wine with fresh blackberries. No need to crush them. Just add sugar and yeast. I press them after about 3 days. There is just enough tannin and the skins provide excellent body to the wine. Strawberries will produce a slightly overly tannic wine from the seeds that...

No idea if they have the enzymes or not. Maybe you'd have to buy them separately.

Yooper has stated what the future holds in store for this black cherry wine

Does the recipe want you to convert the starches in the potatoes to sugar (aka. the mash process as in making beer)? I'm not sure you would want all that starch in your wine otherwise. If the mash was expected, then you would have needed to heat them to 150-168 'F for upwards of a half hour...

While I would agree that using a kettle with false bottom (needs to all be stainless with no aluminum or copper) for your primary fermentation would allow you to easily separate your wine from your fruit, you are going to run into the problem that the remaining fruit will still contain a LOT of...

That would be excessive. You'll want to add a campden tablet per gallon after fermentation. That will suffice for a couple months or a couple rackings. If you are careful not to splash or can purge out your container with CO2 before racking wine into it, then you can minimize pick up of oxygen...

Welcome to making wine. In many ways it is much simpler and forgiving than beer, while at the same time having more complexity. You will certainly get many different suggestions from folks who have been doing it "this way" for a long time. Bottom line is that there are many approaches, most of...

If you control the oxygen exposure and keep up with your sulfites, you can rack more times as needed. For example, you can purge air out of the carboy before racking into it with CO2 or nitrogen, if you have a tank handy. Or you can add a prophylactic dose of 20ppm sulfites each time you rack to...

Yeast manufacturers offer detailed rehydration instructions like the ones found here, so I would tend to follow their suggestion. The first sentence of these instructions is "Proper yeast rehydration is one of the most important steps to help ensure a strong and healthy fermentation." Sure you...

The concern is that (unlike undies being run through the washer/dryer) the cork has plenty of crevasses for wine and bacteria to hide that are difficult to reach with cleanser and sanitizer. The same argument is made for barrels where it is essentially impossible for steam, cleaner, rinse water...

The current TTB threshold is 8.5% depending on volume for the tax rate. https://www.ttb.gov/tax_audit/taxrates.shtml

I've used puree'd fruit (strawberry) and was happy with the results. I do not add water to my fruit wines unless the fruit absolutely needs it, such as for cranberry or lemon. I have no idea about guava though! Anyway, the weight of the puree you use should be similar to that of the whole fruit...

Those would be nitrites, not sulfites

Correction. I checked my records and found that I had also added a couple g/L of citric acid to bring down the pH by 0.2.

When I make cherry wine, I use pitted red tart (ie. pie) cherries and do not add water. This comes to roughly 10lbs of cherries per gallon. This produces a nice cherry pie flavor with enough acid and low enough pH that no acid adjustments are necessary. Not sure if the same holds for sweet...

A few thoughts to chew on as you plan your syrah: Aging time is quite dependent on the aging conditions, the grapes, and the wine-making. Generally, the more tannin in your wine that was extracted from grape skins during fermentation means that it will need to age longer to soften the tannins...

1) Yes, ppm (parts per million) is mg/L 2) Potassium metabisulfite contains 57.6% SO2, so a 440mg campden tablet per gallon should yield 67ppm. You don't want to use sodium metabisulfite. 3) A proper sulfite level depends on the pH. A red wine should nominally have 0.5ppm molecular SO2 (whites...

Hold on, let's emphasize several statements in this thread so that neither the op or future readers get confused. 1) Hydrogen sulfide is H2S, not SO2 2) Time will not dissipate the H2S and can make the problem worse by allowing it to form disulfides/mercaptans (as stated already by...

The pH value is the negative logarithm of hydogren ion concentration. So a pH of 7 means the concentration of H+ is 10^-7 or 0.0000001 moles per liter. However a pH of 3 has a concentration of 10^-3 or 0.001 moles per liter. So you can see that the pH of 3 is 10,000 times more concentrated than...