By this time you’ve racked your wine several times from one carboy to another. The airlock is quiet as fermentation has stopped. You notice that after the last racking, there has been no more sediment deposited on the bottom of the carboy, and using a wine thief, a specially formed glass tube for drawing samples of wine; you fill half a wine glass with your labor of love to check it for clarity and flavor. If you’re satisfied with the wine you can either leave it in the carboy for further aging, (assuming you don’t need the jug for additional batches of wine), transfer it to another container such as a small barrel, or in most cases you’ll choose to bottle. (For info on equipment up to this stage see Pt. 1a and Pt. 1b)
A supply of bottles should be no problem if you’ve been saving them as you drink. Of course, your bottles will need to be cleaned. You can use a pressure washer type attachment on your faucet, a scrubber that attaches to a driver/drill, or the good old fashioned hand bottle brush. A bottle tree, a rack to hold bottles while draining; is a useful purchase if you’re cleaning lots of bottles. Bottles must be sterilized before filling using a device that squirts a sulfite solution into the bottles, or you can just line them up in the sink and pour boiling water over them. Once bottles are clean, dry and sterile they’re ready to be filled. The simplest method uses the same siphoning system you used to rack your wine; fill to the desired level and stop the flow. There are filling devices you can use that attach to your siphon hose and automatically stop the flow when the bottle is full, as well as gravity feed and electric bottle fillers for filling large quantities.
Filled bottles then need to be sealed. I use corks exclusively for closing my bottles and have yet to have a bottle spoil. To seat corks you have several options. Plunger type corkers are OK for small quantities. Single- and double-armed lever corkers are easier and faster to use, although the double-armed type takes a little practice. If you’re going to make more than a couple of cases a year though, a floor or bench corker is a worthwhile investment; much faster and more consistent.
Now we’ve covered the basics of equipment for the home winemaker. Join me for the next series of posts as we get into the actual winemaking process. I’ve got 50 lbs of raspberries to turn into wine!
Front to Rear: Wine thief, bottle brushes, double-armed lever corker, bottle sanitizer, bottle tree, floor corker, Pippin, Emma (Cats are optional).
Front page
Raspberries!
The prospect of all those raspberries fermenting (under your care), mmmmm.
Working on my palate.
Ruth
Story on native grapes
at least I think they’re native, the story does not make entirely clear. But anyway, they’re known as muscadines and it sounds like they might be easier to grow than the imported varieties, sissified delicate Frenchie things that they mostly are.
Any readers in North Carolina who would like to ship me some seeds would find me most grateful… :)
Saving the French wine industry.
T.V. Munson is well known in France for having developed a grape vine that could support the French varietals grafted on, saving the wine industry there from being decimated by an infection/phylloxera that the resistant stock from TX saved them from - he received the Legion d’Honeur for its development. See http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/south…
We have a local department of the County jr. college devoted to the memory of T.V. Isn’t that funny, for a long time the county was ’dry’, too.
Muscadine is a little musky for me, but it’s great stock.
Feral should get to visit, I hope.
Ruth
If they are native I'm curious how this happened
All sorts of food products were, before the great Columbian Exchange started, native to North/South America or native to the Eurasia/Africa complex, but not a lot were native to both.
Jared Diamond covers the matter a hell of a lot better than most history books do in Guns, Germs and Steel but I don’t have my copy any more so can’t provide details. Grape seeds, although nicely sturdy, don’t to my knowledge have any prickles on their exterior to allow them to be carried by birds, and that’s the only way I can think of that seeds could have gotten from one continent to the other.
Or maybe muscadines are just an early import and established themselves fast enough that they were taken as native even though they really weren’t. There is still debate in scholarly circles as to the actual origin of the peanut, with one side holding out that it is native to S/Central America and went back on an early ship to Africa where it acculturated rapidly; the other maintaining that was African in origin and went the other way with early exploring and/or slavetrading ships.
(Shrug.) Gives culinary historians something to argue over at conferences at any rate. :)
Dunno
I know muscadines were familiar to me as a little girl, but only recently found out that a family of my acquaintance saved the wine industry in Europe. I also ate wild cherries as a girl, where did they come from? Dunno. Cognac, France is the sister city of Denison, TX, reps of the wine industry come here yearly to honor the Munsons.
Ruth
Native Grapes
Muscadine, as well as lambrusca grapes (e.g. Concord) are native to the US, perhaps as part of the breakup of Pangea. US native grapes make good, but IMHO not great wine. Not that I won’t make native grape wine….
It’s true that US native grape rootstock saved the French wine industry when phylloxera infected France and decimated their vinyards. There’s very few French vinyards that have grapes dated from before that era.
Been picking wild grapes today, can’t believe it was over 80 degrees in WI in October.
At first…I was irridecent
Then…I became transparant
Finally…I was absent
Thanks Feral (raises glass in northerly direction)
hard enough to track history over a lousy couple of hundred years, but when you start talking about events that took place before the breakup of Pangaea….wow.
However I am concerned that your last three lines suggest you are turning into…
a raisin. You might want to rehydrate or something, you have many more pieces to write here. :)
Personally I am looking at these six very large watermelons sitting in my back yard. I gotta find something to do with them—I didn’t mean to grow them, they just sprouted, honest!—and nobody in the house now likes watermelon.
still hoping somebody sends me some muscatine seeds. I am officially giving up on the vine, purported to be a concord, that I’ve been trying to grow for circa five years now. It will not die, but it will not grow either. I am about ready to experiment and see if running it over with a lawnmower inspires it to do one or the other.
xan, on your grapevine:
after first freeze loosen soil around roots lightly and bury generous amounts of coffee grounds and crushed eggshells in a ring around the main stem, about 12” out and about 4” down. Trim the main stem back to 18”.
have you done a soil test?
More Grapevine Questions
Xan, Concords are normally Very Vigorous vines so there must be some environmental issue affecting your vine. Grapes do not like wet soil, so if the area is too damp that could be stunting your vine. Also grapes and many other plants are adversely affected by the presence of black walnuts. If you have such a tree anywhere near your vine you need to either cut the tree down ;) or move the vine.
I would consider moving the vine anyway as it is obviously not happy where it is.