Over the years we have helped thousands upon thousands of home winemakers to make a better wine. We’ve answered many wine making questions. We’ve provided many wine making tips and insights. We’ve even helped save a wine or two in our day–usually a victim of bad advice from a Friend or relative.
What we have discovered out of all of this (because we learn from each experience just as you) is that 95% of the issues that we see arise with a batch of homemade wine can be distilled down to 10 distinct reasons.
Once we realized this we put together the, “Top 10 Reasons For Fermentation Failure” which you can currently find on our website. It goes over these 10 different reasons, or potholes as I like to call them.
One example is Reason #3 which explains how you can accidentally kill your wine yeast if you use too hot of water to rehydrate it.
You can also think of them as wine making tips. The reason I say this is because if you go over them before you make a batch a wine, they will help you to avoid the potholes. And where there are no pothole, there’s only smooth sailing.
———————————————————————————————————
Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.
my watermellon wine stopped fer after a week can i still ad yeast nutriento or should i rack and start with new yeast ??
This first thing I would suggest doing is taking a hydrometer reading to confirm that the fermentation is not complete. Many, if not most, wines are finished fermenting within 10 days. After that it’s all about letting the wine to have time to clear up. If the fermentation is not complete, then you need to start looking at thing brought up in the artcle, "Top 10 Reasons For Fermentation Failure", linked to above. Adding more yeast will not make any difference one way or the other. If you have already seen fermentation activity, there is plenty of yeast in the wine must it is just dormant at this point for whatever reason.