Introducing Washington Winemaker’s new Wine Recipe Wizard! This is a more robust version of a spreadsheet I’ve been using to create wine recipes. Use it to go from juice to must by adding sugar, water, and acid. The Wizard is designed to tell you exactly how much of each – all you need to do is tell it about your juice (specific gravity, titratable acidity, and volume) and what you want the must to be like (specific gravity and titratable acidity).
This is how I make rhubarb wine, apple wine, raspberry wine, cherry wine, and others. Juice, measure, adjust, then ferment. The Wizard helps with the “adjust” step.
Give it a try – Give me some feedback
I’m not sure there’s a first version of anything that’s perfect, and I don’t expect this to be an exception. There are ways to make it better, and I don’t know all of them. So if you think of one, let me know. I wanted to get it out quickly – for Rachel, Paul, and everyone else who’s been waiting for me to do this – and that meant leaving some unfinished business:
Known Issues
- You have to enter the volume in liters, and this probably isn’t ideal for US users. I plan to add a radio button that allows you to select US or metric units, but in the meantime remember that 1 gallon = 3.785 liters.
- You can only use sugar syrup with a specific gravity of 1.310. Another radio button will be coming soon that will allow honey or custom values.
- The Wizard doesn’t handle juices that are sweeter and more acidic than the must. So if your juice SG is higher than the must SG and your juice TA is higher than your must TA, you will get an error message.
- There are some limits on what values you can enter, but it will still allow you to specify a must that is impossible to create with a standard sugar syrup. In cases like that the Wizard will tell you to add negative volumes of stuff – you won’t run into this for real world juices and ordinary musts, but it’s a bug that is in there and I do plan to fix it.
I’m excited about this, I’ll keep working on it, and I hope it helps.