I am about to age Cabernet Sauvignon in a six-gallon barrel. Should I filter the wine before it goes into the barrel or after it comes out before bottling?
John S. — VA
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Hello John,
Thanks for the great question. I don’t think this question has ever been asked or answered on our blog before, so here we go…
You want your homemade wine to go through the barrel-aging process before filtering. But having said this, it is important to understand that you want to give the wine some time before going into the barrel. You don’t want it to go straight in to the wine barrel the moment the fermentation completes. Give time for the solids to settle out, first. This might only take a few days or it could be a couple of weeks. Regardless, give the wine whatever time it needs.
The goal is to keep the bulk of the sediment from getting into the wine barrel. Most of the sediment at this stage will be comprised of dead yeast cells. Typically, this is something you do not want your wine resting on while in the barrel. The result could be something called autolysis. This is a process that leads to a bitter-nut to metallic taste in the resulting wine.
The reason you want to filter your wine after barrel-aging is because of what happens while the wine is in the barrel. There are a lot of processes that go on. One of the more significant ones is tannin precipitation. As tannin is leached from the wood of the barrel, it sets off a chain-reaction, of sorts, that causes the excessive tannins that are normally in a young wine to solidify and drop out as sediment. This is one of the key factors in reducing the harshness of a wine.
There are many other organic process that go on during aging besides this that can contribute to other precipitates as well. With this in mind, it only makes sense to filter the homemade wine after the barrel-aging and not before. Why filter the wine when there is more sediment on the way.
John, I hope this answers your question. Just remember to also give your wine plenty of time before going into the barrel and then plenty of time while its in there. You can filter your homemade wine after the barrel-aging is complete.
Happy Winemaking,
Ed Kraus
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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.

How do you add the yeast and yeast nutrients to the wine juice? Do you pour it on top and leave it be or do you mix/stir it in? This is for the primary fermentation.
Daniel — CA
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Hello Daniel,
Thanks for the great question. Adding wine making ingredients to a batch of wine is something that can be taken for granted, but there is good way to do it, and a not-so-good way to do it.
In general, it’s a good idea to dissolve any winemaking ingredients in a little bit of the wine before adding it to the entire batch. This includes both the wine yeast and yeast nutrient.
Having said this, I can tell you that I am guilty of not following my own advice. I have often added acid blend, nutrients, tannin and other wine making ingredients directly to whole batch and then stirred to dissolve them.
How we like to go about adding wine making ingredients wouldn’t make much difference one way or the other except that when you add these ingredient directly, you are never 100% sure that they are getting completely dissolve. My guess is they usually are — at least with some time — but this is only a guess on my part. For this reason I would play it safe and pre-dissolve the wine making ingredients in a little sample then blend that back into the batch.
As for adding wine yeast to a batch of wine, there are some different opinions. Even the directions on the packets of dried wine yeast say to do something different than dissolving it into some of the wine must. So why do I differ?
Wine yeast directions typically say to put the yeast into warm water, at a specific temperature, for a specific length of time. This is to re-hydrate the wine yeast… to wake it up, so to speak. Even if these directions are being followed exactly, a portion of the wine yeast is being killed, but not nearly enough to cause the fermentation to fail. When these directions are not being followed precisely, a very large number of the yeast cells can be killed — even all of them.
I have discovered over the years that many home winemakers do not follow these directions precisely. The water temperature is not checked and the length of time is not timed. Sometimes the yeast is left sitting on the counter until completely cooled, when it should have been at that temperature for maybe 10 minutes. The result is dead yeast and a failed fermentation. Every minute the yeast remain at that high temperature, more yeast cells are dying. For every degree higher then the temperature specified, more yeast cells are dying. So as you may be starting to see, there are pro’s and con’s to using either method of adding wine making yeast.
When you add dried wine yeast to a little wine at room-temperature you do not have all these risks. The wine yeast will not take off quite as fast as if it had been re-hydrated per directions, but usually we are talking only a few hours. Some of the yeast cells will die using this method because of cell wall damage, but not anything even close to the extent as if the yeast were over-heated.
For these reasons, I suggest dissolving the dried wine yeast in wine must. Unless you’re actually planning on taking the waters temperature and timing the length of time the yeast spend at that temperature, this is usually your best option.
Daniel, I hope this answers your question about adding wine making ingredients. Just make sure you pre-dissolve everything and you should be good to go!
Best Wishes,
Ed Kraus
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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.

I am making several batches of wine and every one of them has formed a ring of black mold growing at the top of the airlock. I use cleanser water in the airlock assuming it will kill anything it comes in contact. What would cause this mold to form and will it hurt the wine?
Greg R. — ID
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Hello Greg,
Not only is there mold growing in your airlock, there’s mold floating in the air, in our cars, on our clothes, in our homes. There’s mold spores everywhere, just in small enough numbers as to be of no consequence to anything or even to be detectable. But, if mold gets the right conditions, it can grow and colonize. Because of this, no matter how well you clean and sanitize a surface, mold can land and grow there if the conditions are right — temperature, humidity, sunlight, nutrients, etc.
The mold growing in your airlock, by itself, is not going to hurt the wine by being there. If there is a fermentation, CO2 gas will be blowing off keeping any mold spores from getting to the wine. However, this can become a big problem once the fermentation has stopped. Not only is there no protective gas blowing out through the airlock, there is a possibility that some air can flow backwards through the airlock and into the wine, taking mold spores along with it. If fact, if your fermentation is already complete, I would strongly urge you to add a dose of sulfite to the wine, if you have not done so already, This could be either Campden tablets, potassium metabisulfite or sodium metabisulfite.
I normally don’t recommend this, but since you have a stubborn mold growth going on, you may want to consider filling your airlock with a high-alcohol distillate such as grain alcohol or Everclear. This will keep your airlock continuously free of mold growth and kill any mold spores that my be trying to get their way into your precious wine. Also, if the alcohol gets sucked into the wine for whatever reason, it would not harm it. Any mold spores in the alcohol will be dead.
The reason I don’t normally recommend using alcohol in an airlock is because the alcohol evaporates rather quickly and can cause the airlock to go dry if you are not paying attention. But you can go this route. Just understand that you will need to add more alcohol every few days. Don’t let the airlock go dry; check it often.
Having mold growing in airlocks is not a pressing issue that winemakers normally have to deal with. Sanitizing the airlocks and filling them with water is usually enough, but it seems that there is a lot of mold in your neck of the woods right now, so it is something that needs to be dealt with. Don’t feel that you will always need to use alcohol in your airlocks. Next time you make wine there may be no mold growth in the airlock at all.
Happy Wine Making,
Ed Kraus
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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.

I know nothing about mead. What does mead taste like? Dry or sweet.
Jerre — TN
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Hello Jerre,
This is a very loaded question because there are is such a wide varieties of meads. There are meads made with herbs or spices added in addition to the honey (metheglin). There are meads made with the fruit (melomel). You can mix honey with apple juice to make a cyser. You can also mix honey with grape juice to make a pyment. This list goes on and on. This makes it hard to answer the question: “What does mead taste like?”
Not all honey is the same, either. What the bees use to spin the honey can make a great difference. There’s apple blossom honey, clover honey, buckwheat honey, tupelo honey… Again, the list is endless. The source of nectar will have an effect on the resulting mead. The cheapest, generic honey will be wild flower honey.
Just like any wine, mead can be made sweet or dry. This is completely up to you, based on your personal preference. It is simply a matter of sweetening to taste at bottling time with sugar, more honey, or anything else you’d like to experiment with. A wine stabilizer (potassium sorbate) should be added at the same time to prevent the chance of a re-fermentation in the bottle.
The point here is that there are an extremely wide range of flavors that can be experienced when drinking meads. For this reason putting a good description as to what a mead tastes like is almost impossible. It is similar to the question, “what does a grape wine taste like?” The flavors vary to greatly to encapsulate in a few words or paragraphs and there is nothing to accurately compare it to.
Here’s what I will say, all meads do have a subtle core flavor or character that can be identified. There is a flavor of honey. If it is a dry mead, imagine what honey would taste like without the sweet. Now take that flavor and imagine what it would taste like with the heat of alcohol. This is the best possible way I can think of to answer the question, what does a mead taste like? However ,I do confess that this is completely inadequate.
If you need more description than this, I would suggest buying a bottle. Actually taste a mead for yourself before expending time and effort on making your own mead. There is no other way to really know what a mead tastes like other than to try if for yourself. In my personal experience there is nothing to hate about a mead. I find most meads very pleasant and some even interesting. I also like to use honey two back-sweeten my other wine or to raise the potential alcohol of my other wines. Here’s a mead recipe to get you started.
Best Wishes,
Ed Kraus
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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.