Make wine like a beer wart why not

Answers below:

Yes alcohol will preserve the wine from many infections and will prevent anything really bad from happening to your wine. After all, Oxidation may or may not make your wine taste bad but it will not hurt you. There are no known pathogens found in wine so you are in general safe even if wine tastes bad.

In general you are correct. During primary fermentation is so strong and CO2 generation is so great that you do not really have to protect your wine from O2. Just from bugs. So you do not need to have it under an airlock. When fermentation slows down after 3 to 7 days, then you need to put it in a carboy under an air lock. Even then, there is enough CO2 generated to purge a reasonable head space very quickly. What is a reasonable head space? Probably from 1-3 to 1-6 of the volume of the carboy. This is good as it leaves enough head space to accommodate any foaming that can occur.

After fermentation is when you need to worry about head space. Then there is not enough CO2 coming off to purge a large head space. You need to keep it as small as possible because every time you rack you have a new head space and most of that O2 will react with the wine if the wine is not protected by something like sulfite.

There is another good reason to go with a small head space and use sulfite. That is because the experts say you should. People did this long before anyone knew why it worked. If is not bad for a newbie to question standard practice but it is foolish to go against it. It is seldom wise to do something different just because you do not know why a standard is being followed or because you can rationalize your way out of doing it.

Ray