Organised by the job it does, and pH comes first for a reason.

Tracks the ferment from must to dry. The gap between your starting and finishing gravity is the only reliable way to know the alcohol you actually made.

Reads sugar from two drops of juice, which is how you test grapes on the vine without carrying a hydrometer jar into the vineyard. Stops being accurate once fermentation starts.

The most important instrument on this page. pH decides how much of your sulphite is actually protecting the wine, and dosing without knowing it is guesswork.

Acid is what makes a wine taste alive rather than flabby, and you cannot correct what you have not measured.

Measuring free SO2 is the other half of the pH equation. Adding sulphite without measuring what is already there is how wines end up both over-sulphured and under-protected.

Secondary fermentation and bulk ageing need a vessel you can fill to the neck. Headspace is where oxidation happens.

Red must ferments on the skins and needs a wide opening you can punch a cap down into. A narrow carboy makes that impossible.

Lets CO2 escape and keeps oxygen and fruit flies out. Fruit flies carry acetobacter, which is how a good wine becomes vinegar.

Strain choice sets your temperature range, alcohol tolerance and how much of the fruit's aromatics survive. Wild ferments are a choice, not a default.

Nitrogen-starved yeast produces hydrogen sulphide, and a wine that smells of rotten egg during fermentation is almost always a nutrition problem rather than an infection.

The antioxidant and antimicrobial that everything else depends on. Dose it against your pH, not against a habit.

The acid grapes already contain, and therefore the one to add. Bench-trial before treating the whole volume.

Stops surviving yeast refermenting a sweet wine in the bottle. Never use it without sulphite, or bacteria can turn it into a geranium smell.

Free-run juice and pressed juice are different wines. A press lets you decide how hard to squeeze, which decides how much tannin and bitterness comes with it.

Racking off the lees without splashing. Every transfer is an oxygen event, and splashing turns a transfer into an aeration.

Dissolved CO2 makes a young wine taste thin and prickly, and stops fining agents dropping properly.

Buy them before harvest. Every home winemaker has at some point been ready to bottle with nothing to bottle into.

A hand corker mangles corks and lets in oxygen. A floor corker compresses the cork properly and is the difference between a wine that ages and one that oxidises.

Cork grade sets how long the wine can age. A cheap agglomerated cork is fine for something you drink this year and wrong for anything you cellar.

Moves wine without a siphon and without oxygen pickup, and doubles as a degasser. The biggest single reduction in oxidation risk available to a home setup.