Being absolutely paranoid about methanol it has taken me a while to consider the use of a still.
TLDR: I will be OK distilling home made and commercial red wine as it's fermented under controlled conditions.
I'm a chemist. This should be easy. But home distilling strips me of all of the process and procedure and equipment that I'd have available to monitor and test (and I don't have access to the testing equipment any more) and it's a real thing for me to not wake up dead.
With all the reading and watching I've done over the last few years I've finally overcome this concern especially if completing controlled fermentations, simple washes with commercial yeasts.
However I still have a quantity of home made and commercial (red) wine that is less than lovely that I want to "clean up", and I don't know hoe some of it has been made. The home made wine was made using a commercial yeast so I'm reasonably happy that I can distil this with reasonable safety. But just to make sure I looked through the newbie information to see what was there.
What are cuts and why do we do them? viewtopic.php?f=57&t=11918 good solid information and a really good reference at the end of the article that made me look at other references (did I mention I was paranoid).
So for anyone who's looking to distil red wine this next article is a good read (especially if you suffer from insomnia) and really help me understand that if I follow normal protocol and even have a little bit of smearing in the headshots, I should be well clear of any real nasties in the finished product (especially as most distillers seem to leave out a fair volume of headshots)
https://www.bio-conferences.org/article ... _02028.pdf