Wine Making Problems

Potential Problems that happen whilst Making Wine

No matter how good you are at making wine there are some problems that can happen despite your best efforts. There are things that can happen with a misplaced cork, a bottle not settled right when racking or even exploding bottles if too much carbon dioxide winds up contained in the wine.

A very common problem when making wine is when fermentation will not begin. It can be a problem with the yeast or in the unfermented grape juice. Sometimes the yeast is too old and actually dies instead of doing its job and changing the sugar to alcohol. This can happen because of poor storage or being shipped wrong. Sometimes this is caused by exposure to temperature extremes. 

Other times the fermentation begins, but then it stops before it should. This can happen because the temperature changes in a way that makes the yeast stop or if there are not enough nutrients to keep it going. If this happens you need to determine what has gone wrong and try to kick-start the process again. Usually you can find the problem, but not always, especially if there is more than one thing that has affected the fermentation process. In general adding some yeast nutrient and even yeast energizer will be a good step. You really can’t go wrong doing this. Then make sure the temperature is about seventy degrees. If its not then bring it up, or take it down, so that it is.  This should do the job of restarting things. Allow three days to pass before trying anything else. If it still hasn’t restarted buy yeast known to restate fermentation and use it.  It should get the process going in a matter of hours.

What if the wine has a flat taste? This means there is not enough acid in the wine and you need only add some, stirring it up after and then putting the airlock back on. Check it in a few hours and repeat this process until it tastes right to you. But what if your wine smells wrong? If it has a musty smell or taste it means that the wine has been standing too long and the sediment is causing taste problems. It should have been racked. But it can also be a sign that you used the wrong yeast. You must only use wine yeast if you accidentally used baker’s yeast that would account for the problem. There’s a remedy for this problem. If you add come activated charcoal you can correct it. It will likely take several treatments and forty-eight hours to correct.

You have just opened a bottle of your wine and found it smells like rotten eggs. Can it be saved? The answer is sometimes. What you must do is pour the wine from the container its in to another one. Repeat this procedure up to four times, each time allowing a few hours to pass. It the wine still smells bad after four changes it is not savable