June - August 2008 Blog Archives

The Legality of Home Winemaking

Posted by: Greg on June 1st, 2008

When I first began making wine at home, one of the first questions that I was asked by a relative was; are you sure what you are doing is legal? I'm sure my relative was confusing homemade wine with moonshine and we all know that moonshine is quite illegal! According to United States Code of Federal Regulations, it is legal for an adult who is 18 years of age or older to produce wine for personal or family use without payment of tax and not for sale. As long as you don't sell your wine, you can produce:

To read the actual United States Code of Federal Regulation regarding wine for personal or family use, please click here.

Many states have laws limiting what can be done with homemade wine, so check with your state government to find out more about laws on home winemaking, and its legalities.

I was unaware of any laws on home winemaking in Louisiana, the state in which I reside in, so I contacted the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control (ATC) via email to find out more. Kelli Barmad, an ATC representative was kind enough to respond to my email and inform me that the ATC enforces the federal law in the State of Louisiana. Prior to receiving a response to my email from the ATC, I was a little concerned about my state law, because I had read some articles on the net that some states will only allow consumption of legally made homemade wine on the premises which it was made, and sometimes only by those who actually made the wine. But this doesn't seem to be the case in Louisiana, which is good news to me and every Louisianaian that makes and gives away homemade wine.

Wine Log

Posted by: Greg on June 1st, 2008

It doesn't matter what type or style of wine you make, it is important to keep an accurate and detailed record of your wine making process. In doing so, if a problem ever arises with one of your wines, you can refer back to the wine log that was kept on that particular wine and comb through your notes and information contained within that log and it will help you find where the trouble started or at least, give you a good idea where the problem may have started.

Every home winemaker has encountered problems at one time or another with a wine and by keeping an accurate and detailed wine log, you will save yourself a lot of sleepless nights trying to figure out what went wrong with a wine that you have worked so hard on. Take it from me, I have been there many times and this is the reason, I took the time to develop a simple but effective wine log that you can use to record your wine making process.

There is only one version of my wine log available for your pleasure, a Microsoft Word Document. Click on the icon to download.

 

Yeast Strains

Posted by: Greg on June 1st, 2008

Yeast is a living creature, metabolizing, reproducing, and living off the ingredients in wine and it is their job to eat the sugar and convert it into alcohol. What a life!

There are thousands of kinds of yeast on this planet. Back in ancient times, wine was most likely discovered by accident when grapes were stored for too long in an earthenware jar. The wild yeast that was present in the grape skins started fermenting and BAM wine was made. Of course, those ancient people didn't know what caused the grape juice to turn into wine. All they knew that the fermented juice lifted their spirits and rejuvenated their tired bodies. It is safe to say that the quality of fermented juice wasn't a world class wine, but it was good enough for those ancient people back then.

Then someone discovered how to isolate yeast that was more reliable that would produce a better quality wine. Eventually, various strains of yeasts that gave a good clean fermentation, firm sediment and high alcohol were harvested.

Today, home winemakers have access to good wine yeasts that produce quality wines like the professional wineries produce. Four companies - Lallemand (Lalvin), Red Star, White Labs and Wyeast - produce the vast majority of wine-yeast strains used by home winemakers, and meadmakers, in North America. Here's an overview of the yeast strains these firms sell in small packages intended for home hobbyists (which is generally five grams for dry yeast packets and 35 to 175 ml for liquid vials or packets). In either format, this is the right amount to inoculate a five-gallon batch. There are other companies and other strains, but these are the most common - you should find them at most home winemaking supply stores.

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

Posted by: Greg on July 1st, 2008

Just the other day, I was customizing my Facebook profile with some personal stuff and I thought it would be a classy touch to my profile to post one of my favorite poems on the page. You know kinda show all my friends and people that know me, a different side of my personality. I searched my bookshelf for a book called "Jim Metcalf's Journal", a collection of poetry that was written in 1974 by the award winning New Orleanian journalist. A friend gave me the book many many years ago and I managed to hang on to it throughout the years, despite moving around quite a bit from place to place in my younger years. Anyway, I located the book, but I wanted to know if Jim's widow might have released any unpublished material since his death in 1977, so I searched the net via Google and came across a website (neworleansradiotheatre.org) that had a lot of old photos of WWL-TV's journalist back in the days of my youth. As soon as I viewed the pictures, a flood of memories hit me like a brick, it is almost like I took a step back in time. Other journalist pictures wasn't posted on that particular website like Bill Elder, so I searched further and found a lot of pictures on WWL-TV's official website.

 

 

When I was just a young lad growing up in Mandeville in mid 1970's, there was only four local TV stations broadcasting out of New Orleans on the dial: WWL Channel 4, WDSU Channel 6, WVUE Channel 8 (Now Fox 8), and WGNO Channel 26. Yes, it was a time when there was no cable-tv or internet to entertain us, it was the days of analog TV and aluminum foil rabbit ears which helped bring in the signal. My parents only watched one TV station for the news and it was WWL-TV and the nine individuals (the ones I remember the most) pictured above came into our home every evening. They were as much part of my family as my brother and two sisters. I remember it like it was yesterday, my parents would come home from a hard days work, my mom would whip up something quick for supper and afterwards, we would all gather around the TV set in the living room and watch the evening news together.

The local news was important to us all back then like it is now, because it kept us uptodate with everything that was going on in our communities from politics to the weather. The weather was especially important to us, since we lived in a hurricane proned area and Nash Roberts was the man that everyone relied upon to give us the scoop. Nash was very low tech, armed only with a black marker and a paper map, he could accurately predict where a hurricane was going to make landfall and his word was just as valuable as gold to the local people. If you lived in my household, you had better remained quiet during Nash's forecast or you would have been burned at the stake by my parents. Nah, they really wouldn't do that, but you would get yelled out.

Sunday nights wasn't complete without watching Jim Metcalf's "A Sunday Journal", a 30 minute program about Louisianians and their hobbies, nature and music, and poetry and everyone across the New Orleans area that tuned in enjoyed the show. In 1975, Jim and his show were awarded the Peabody Award for "good writing, excellent photography, and artistic presentation.", but we were all saden when Jim died two years later in 1977 from cancer and the show was cancelled.

I could go on and on about how these people gave so much back to our community and the City of New Orleans, but unforunately it would probably take a couple of pages. These individuals kept us informed through hard times and good and even though they got paid to do a job, their effort and dedication will never be forgotten. Thank you WWL-TV for being there for us throughout the years.

Gustav's Apple

Posted by: Greg on August 29th, 2008

Here in Southeastern Louisiana, we are waiting for the arrival of Hurricane Gustav, which is projected to make landfall on early Tuesday morning somewhere around Morgan City and that places St. Tammany Parish on the east side of the storm which is the most damaging side. Not only do I have to worry about possibly property damage due to strong winds and rain, but I also have to worry about loss of power for I don't know how long, and on top of all the other troubles a hurricane brings, I now have to worry about keeping the fermenting temperature down on a batch of apple wine that is still in the primary. I will be tranferring the wine to the secondary tomorrow morning and spend the rest of the day glued to the TV set for further updates on the projected path of Hurricane Gustav. We was going to name this wine "Adam's Apple" but that was before Gustav threatened Southeastern Louisiana, so we decided to name the wine, "Gustav's Apple".

Just in case, we do lose power, I do have a generator that I can use to power our refrigerator, freezer and other appliances, but my generator has a limit and I will have to use it wisely to get us through the days and possibly weeks of no power after the hurricane. I also have to think about how I'm going to keep our other aging wines cool if we lose power and that is going to be a real challenge. If need be, I have a 110 volt air condition window unit that I can use to help cool our aging wines. This coming Sunday, the National Weather Service should know exactly where this storm is heading, so it is a waiting game for us.

Unsuccessful SQL Injection Attack

Posted by: Greg on August 9th, 2008

This morning, I checked my Latest Visitors log to see how many people visited this site in the last 24 hours and I noticed three different IP addresses tried unsuccessfully to inject a virus into this website using a SQL Injection script. There was one major problem that the attackers encountered when running the script on my site - this site doesn't have a database to infect, it is all HTML code! The attacks was unsuccessful!

Short sample of the attack:

?';DECLARE%20@S%20CHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(0x4445434C415245204054207661 3415445205461626C655F437572736F72%20AS%20CHAR(4000));EXEC(@S);

The attacks came from:

Beijing, China
60.189.110.254 | Date: Aug 09 06:05:03 | ISP: CHINANET-ZJ TAIZHOU NODE NETWORK

Lisbon, Portugal
213.22.1.178 | Date: Aug 09 04:19:10 | ISP: TVCABO-PORTUGAL CABLE MODEM NETWORK

Taipei, Taiwan
118.166.134.174 | Date: Aug 09 00:00:16 | ISP: CHUNGHWA TELECOM DATA COMMUNICATION BUSINESS GROUP

If you own one of those IPs, it is likely you no longer are in control of your machine, because your computer is infected with a virus that has hijacked your computer and is using it as part of a botnet to further spread the virus. If this is not the case, you just embarrassed yourself and you will never be nothing but a ignorant script kiddie!!!

Lalvin Bourgovin RC 212

Posted by: Greg on August 3rd, 2008

Lalvin has been our primary yeast of choice for all our fermentation needs since we begin making wine. In the past, we've used other yeast manufacturers with good results, but we feel the best overall performing yeast comes from Lalvin. Last month, we used Lalvin Bourgovin RC 212 for the first time on a small experimental batch of Wild Blackberry/Black Currant. Most of the time, when we are sitting around the house thinking up new recipes using different blends of fruit or berry ingredients and wondering how they will taste together, we'll ferment a small experimental batch of wine, age it for 4 months or so and taste it along the way to see if it is worthwhile to ferment a bigger batch. If the batch turns out not so good, we use it as drain cleaner and our little experiment doesn't end up costing us an arm and a leg, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, during primary fermentation, I really didn't notice anything out of the ordinary that might have alerted me that something was wrong when I checked the progress of the wine daily as I often do whenever we are fermenting. After secondary fermentation was complete, I popped the airlock off the carboy to rack the wine off the lees into another sterilized carboy to start the clearing process and that is when my nose detected a strong "burnt match" odor. The first thought that popped into my mind was hydrogen sulfide (H2S) which is an odor that I'm very famaliar with being that I work for a water & wastewater utility company and we all know what sewer smells like pee-yew! At the time, I wasn't sure what could be causing the H2S problem, until later on in the day when I visited my favorite online winemaking discussion forum Winepress.us, where I read a thread posted by a member who had a similiar problem using the same yeast strain.

After reading the thread thoroughly, it seems Lalvin Bourgovin RC 212 yeast requires high nitrogen nutrient additions to avoid the potential development of H2S. I checked my wine log to see if I had added the proper dosage of yeast nutrient and campden tablets to the must prior to fermentation and everything looked in order. I know without a doubt that my equipment was sterilized prior to preparing the must for fermentation, so I ruled out possible bacterial contamination due to poor sanitation. Since this was the first time I used this particular strain of yeast, I thought maybe the yeast nutrient that I was using might not contain a high enough dosage of nitrogen or diammonium phosphate (DAP) that this yeast requires. After closer examination of the label on the bottle of yeast nutrient that I used, I determined that my yeast nutrient wasn't sufficient enough for this yeast.

Now that I solved the mystery of the H2S problem with my wine, it was time to treat the wine in order to head off more potential problems. Because H2S is highly volatile, it is easily removed by splash racking the wine several times in a carboy or vessel which allows oxygen to come in contact with the wine and the oxygen counteracts the H2S, which is exactly what I did. I measured the sulfite level in the wine with a test kit and it was ok. I used KITOSOL 40 to fine the wine and three days later, the wine was crystal clear with no odor of H2S.

Wheeew, I'm glad that is over with!

 

 

PAGE UPDATED 01.30.2010

 

 

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