I think people worry too much about vinegar infection. It is easy to start
vinegar with a good mother of vinegar inoculation and you can make some good
vinegar. You can also start bad vinegar by letting fruit fly's get in your
must at some point and then letting your finished wine be exposed to air for
a long time. But in reality your wine does have to be exposed to air and
for a longer period than it will take to go bad due to oxidation. So,
unless you are really careless and making really bad wine, it is not going
to turn to vinegar even if some fruit fly's get in it.

I have had a few commercial wines turn to vinegar. They were bottles that I
had opened drunk some but did not finish the bottle, and then pushed the
cork back in the bottle with the cork screw hole in it. Then I put them in
my liquor cabinet standing up so the cork dried out. I forgot them for
perhaps a year. They turned to very nasty tasting vinegar. If you treat
your wines this badly, you may make bad vinegar too.

Ray

"Rob" wrote in message
oups.com...
3) Even if they do inoculate your wine, and they certainly can, that
does
not mean it will turn to vinegar unless you use really bad wine making
techniques. To turn to vinegar, the wine must be exposed to air for a
really long time. Months. If no air, no vinegar. Read up on how
vinegar
is made. You start with wine, you inoculate it heavily (not with a few
fruit flies), and then you wait for months.

I don't know any more about vinegar than has been covered here in this
group, but this raised a question for me, based on what I had read in
older posts.

Here, we say that it's really tough to start making vinegar, but
previously, I remember reading that once you start making vinegar, you
don't want to make wine anywhere near there for fear of inoculating the
new wine. I wouldn't figure these two statements match up.

I don't make vinegar, and don't expect to, but I'm just curious about
this.

Rob

Slightly off topic but I had an asnt problem this year and my wife told
be to mix a little sugar and borax together as a syrup; I put several
small cups of it around and poured some on my outside door tread. The
next day they were gone, completely.
Joe