Great news! Our line of Niagara Mist wine making products has just gotten a little bit bigger. A brand-new wine making kit has just been released by Niagara Mist. Introducing, White Pear Pinot Grigio!
Bold Flavors
It’s a unique and refreshing blend of juicy pears and tangy, white Pinot Grigio grapes. This exciting, new combo is destined to become a summertime hit.
Exploding with crisp and fruity flavors that work in concert with subtle highlights of lemon flavor. Also, hints of custard and white flowers can be notices in its fresh finish.
Perfect for spending time out on the deck or hangin’ out around the pool. White Pear Pinot Grigio will aim right for your taste-buds, and never let go.
Bottles of White Pear Pinot Grigio also makes nice wine making gifts to take to parties, or to pass out to family and friend.
About Niagara Mist
Niagara Mist has been providing home wine making ingredient kits for many, many years. They specialize in offering bold, unique blends of wine grapes and fruits as homemade wine kits.
Some of there more popular flavors are: Peach Chardonnay, Black Cherry Pinot Noir, Raspberry Merlot and Tropical Fruit Riesling.
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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.

The Wine Institute, a California based organization representing over 1,000 wineries throughout the state of California, stated in it’s recent report that the U.S. has now surpassed France in the amount of wine it consumes. In 2010, we Americans consumed some 330 million cases of wine, topping France’s 320 million cases for the same year. This makes the U.S. the largest consumer of wine in the world.
While France is still the biggest consumer of wine on a per capita bases, this report still illustrates the continued, growing trend that wine has been enjoying over the past several years within the United States.
In The Shadows Of This Growth…
has also been an ever-present group of advancing home wine makers. While the commercial wine makers have been getting the spotlight, home-grown, private wine makers have been toiling away in their basement and garages–making stupendous wines that have demanded their own moments in the spotlight at county fairs and wine tastings across the U.S.
In America, there have always been individuals making wine, but now there seems to be a shift in who these Americans are and the kinds of wines they make. No longer do you only see rural farmers making a batch of wine from fruits they’ve grown in their own garden. Now you see individuals from every walk of life making wine: doctors, auto-mechanics, secretaries.
And they’re not just making wine from your convenient, garden-variety fruits. These grass-root individuals have all kinds of wine brewing–from actual wine making grapes. Grapes grown in California, France, Italy, South Africa–hundreds of grape varieties grown in every corner of the planet.
For example, you might find someone bringing an Australian Shiraz to a local wine club meeting. While it was technically made in their kitchen, the Shiraz grapes were grown in Australia, giving the wine the pleasant, agreeable characters we all would associate with an Australian Shiraz.
The same could be said for a home wine maker who is making a wine with Merlot grapes grown in California’s North Central Valley, or Sangiovese grapes grown in Tuscany, Italy. While the home wine maker makes these wines in their home, the grapes they use bring along with it the character of their growing region, also know as the wine’s terrior.
How To Get The Grapes
You may be asking yourself at this point, “How do these home wine makers get these grapes?” That’s a good question. It’s hard to imagine that these grapes could travel such distances without becoming damaged in some way, and you would be right in this assumption, as it turns out, it’s not that hard after all.
In fact, it’s simple. The wine industry discovered long ago that the transporting of grape juice is much more safe and effective than the transporting of the grapes themselves. Now, grapes that are destined for travel are first processed. They are put through the grape crushers; then left to sit on the skins as necessary for body and color; then dumped in the grape presses to be pressed.
The juice is not allowed to ferment while in transit. Instead, the fermentation is suppressed and the juice is stabilized. Once the wine is ready to be made, all that needs to be done is to add a packet of wine yeast.
Find Out More…
These juices are now readily available to the home wine maker. In fact, we carry over 200 different blends and varieties of these grape juices on our own website. They come with all the additional ingredients you will need to make the wine: the wine yeast, clarifiers, etc. And they come with amateur-ready directions that are straight-forward and easy to follow.
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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.

One subject that gets asked about a lot by beginners is how to make white wines. They usually ask about it in a way that leads me to believe that they think it is a completely different process than making red wines, one that just skirts the fringes of main-steam wine making.
The fact of the matter is, there are more similarities than differences between making the two. You use the same wine making materials, the same grape crushers, the same grape presses. Where the primary difference lies is the grape. You make white wines from white grapes; you make red wines from red grapes.
A second, more minor, difference is how the primary fermentation is done. The primary fermentation is the first 5 to 7 days of highly active fermentation. When making a red wine, the fermentation is allowed to progress with the grape’s crushed pulp still in the juice (must). This is done to extract color and body from the grape skins. It’s what makes a Red, a Red. After the primary fermentation has completed the pulp is then pressed for the juice and discarded.
When making a white wine the primary fermentation is done without the pulp in with the juice (must). The grapes are both crushed and pressed before hand. It is only the grape juice that makes it to the fermenter.
When the issue becomes using our wine ingredient kits to make a white wine, it gets even less complicated. While the color of the wine is still dependant on the grape used, there is no difference in the way in which either type of juice is fermented.
In the case of red wines all the color and body needed has already been extracted from the pulp. The producer then runs it through their grape presses, so the juice comes to you pulp free. As you might expect for white wine ingredient kits, the juice has no pulp either.
The directions that come with either wine ingredient kit is identical. So no matter if you want to make a red wine or a white wine, there is no additional considerations either way. Just follow the directions.
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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.

Here is a very real fact. If you want to put a full-size wine bottle cork into a wine bottle, you need to become a real corker…  What I mean to say is, you need to use a real corker.
When you decant a bottle of wine, the cork stopper that you pull out is only a fraction of its original size. This is because the cork was compressed before it was plunged into the wine bottle. Wine corks are pressed in this way in an attempt to get the optimum seal for aging the wine.
A standard size wine cork stopper is almost an inch in diameter–right around 15/16″. The standard 750ml wine bottle opening is 3/4″. This means the cork must be compressed before it will even fit in the opening. This is were the corker comes into play.
A wine bottle corker is basically a tool that allows you to cork wine bottles with little effort. It compresses and plunges the wine cork stopper into the wine bottle without tearing or mangling the cork–something you could not do on your own.
We offer three different models of corkers for the home winemaker: a hand-held corker, a floor-standing corker, and a bench-style corker.
All three can cork a wine bottle equally well. Which one you should choose is mostly a question of batch size. The Gilda Hand-Held Corker works great for individuals bottling 20 or 30 bottles at a time.
For those of you who are bottling a little more at a time, you might want to consider a Floor-Model Corker or a Bench-Model Corker.  These corkers are a little faster and can even handle a two-man team for very large jobs–one to load the bottle and one to load the cork stopper. Add any of these corkers to your wine making operation and you’ll become what’s know in my book as a real corker.
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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.

Dear Sir;
I have a question concerning adding the wine conditioner (sweetener) to a batch of Zinfandel wine I just made.
If the wine has a rather harsh taste at this point (before aging) won’t that affect the determination of how much sweetener that needs to be added before bottling?  In other words will the harsh taste mask or interfere with the sweetness taste adjustment?
Jay
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Hello Jay,
Yes, you are correct. You have to be careful with how much of a sweetener, such as Wine Conditioner, you add when bottling homemade wine. This is because the wine is going to develop into something much different during aging. Most noticeably, will be the mellowing of its harsher characteristics.
When bottling the wine, if sweetening is added to cover these displeasing flavors, by taste, you may be headed for a wine that will end up too sweet once the effects of aging have come to full fruition.
This is actually an argument for aging wine in bulk instead of in wine bottles. By letting the wine age in something like carboys for a few month, before bottling, you will be in a position to add any sweetening desired without worrying about getting the wine too sweet.
This is another one of my wine making tips I like to share with beginners. Bulk age your wine in wine carboys, first, if you plan of sweetening your wine at bottling time.
Happy Wine Making
Customer Service
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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.