You can avoid wine making disasters by avoiding these common mistakes:

 1. Inadequate Equipment 

     Winemaking equipment, such as pails, carboys, air locks and spoons are often similar to items around the home. However, in many cases, proper winemaking equipment and utensils are made of special materials, and this can influence your finished product.

     Re-using plastic pails from other sources, like buckets that previously held food, is always a mistake. The food odors will have sunk into the plastic, and will taint the wine. Also, plastic items not intended for food purposes, such as brand-new garbage pails must never be used for winemaking. The pigments, UV protectants and plasticizers (chemicals used to keep the plastic from becoming brittle) will leach into the wine, and could affect your health. Saving a few dollars by using bad equipment is not worth it.

2. Cleaning and Sanitation    
     90% of all winemaking failures can be traced to a lapse in cleaning or sanitation and yes, they are two different things. Cleaning chemicals remove visible dirt and residue from your equipment.

     Sanitizing is treating that equipment with sanitizing chemicals that will eliminate, or prevent the growth of, spoilage organisms. Everything that comes in contact with your wine must be clean, and properly sanitized.   One single lapse could cause a failure of your batch.

3. Failure to Follow Instructions 

     The kit instructions are based both on sound winemaking techniques, and trials. If your kit fails to ferment correctly, or clear sufficiently, there may be no easy way to correct it if you have not followed the directions.

 4. Bad Water
     Water is not quite as critical as many people think. In fact, if your water is fit to drink, it is usually just fine for winemaking. However, if your water has a lot of hardness or a high mineral content (especially iron) it could lead to permanent haze or off flavors. Also, if your house is equipped with a salt-exchange water softener, that water can't be used for winemaking. If you're in doubt, go ahead and use bottled water to make your wine. You will appreciate the difference.

5. Poor Yeast Handling
     It doesn't take much mishandling to make wine yeast sulky and uncooperative. The packet of dried yeast that comes with your kit is of very high quality, but it is a living organism that needs to be revived in a specific way. 

     You can re-hydrate the yeast if you wish, but be aware that anything less than utterly strict adherence to proper re-hydration procedures will kill your yeast instead of helping it. There's a long scientific explanation for this, but it boils down to viability. Simply sprinkling the yeast on top of the must will give you a higher live cell count than re-hydrating in most cases, and will be far less trouble.

6. Poor Temperature Control    
     Kit instructions tell you to ferment your wine within a specific temperature range. We recommend 65°F to 75°F. Yeast likes these temperatures and it doesn't like fluctuations.

     For the home wine maker, if the fermentation area is too cool the wine will ferment very slowly. This will lead to an excess of CO₂ gas (fizz) in the wine, and it may not be ready to stabilize and fine on the appropriate day. Even worse, the kind of fining agents included with kits don't work well at temperatures outside of the 65°F to 75°F range. Below 64°F your wine kit may not clear at all!

7. Adding Sulfite and Sorbate at the Wrong Time   

   Sulfite and Sorbate, the stabilizers in the kit work to inhibit yeast activity. If, by mistake, you add them too early your wine may not finish fermenting.

If you add the sorbate on day one, the yeast will never become active, and the kit will not ferment.