It is now early January 2000. The wine has now cleared. Notice the heavy sedimentation at the bottoms of the carboy. The photo on the right shows the surface of the sediment after the clear wine has been syphoned off. It is composed of dead yeast cells, grape solids, and potassium bitartrate crystals.
Here, the cleared wine is being syphoned off into a sterilized carboy. Of course, I have to do a taste test at this point. It really didn't taste too bad, but I wouldn't recommend drinking it as it is very yeasty and tart, but you can get an idea of what it will be like. I will keep the filled carboys in an area where the temperature drops as low as 16 degrees F. throughout the winter. This allows some excess acid to naturally precipitate out as tartrate crystals.
July 30, 2000: Time to start bottling the finished wine. First, I need to rack off the clear wine as I did back in January. This time however, there is very little if any sediment. The loss was about 300 ml. Syphoning the wine into a flexible cubitainer makes bottling much easier. Note the corks soaking in the bottle on the table.
The actual bottling consists of first washing out the bottles, then sterilizing them with a solution of potassium metabisulfite, re-rinsing them again, and then finally pouring the wine in via flexible tubing from the cubitainer. The corks, which have been soaking in water for a few hours, are now placed in the corker, squeezed and pressed into each bottle. The bottles are then rinsed and of course, there is always a partial bottle left over which is what I am sampling in the right hand picture.
If you'd like to learn about CORK, here are a few interesting sites I've found.
The Natural Cork Quality Council
Suber
SA
(This is a commercial site, but
they give a wonderful history and tour of the world of CORK)
When the bottles are dry, the labels are applied. Out of the 100# of grapes, we bottled 38 bottles (Two of us actually chip into making the wine, so I ended up with 19 bottles). Total cost was about $140 bucks or $3.70 a bottle. For those of you wondering how Uncle Sam* fits into the picture, he allows:
(1) 200 gallons per calendar
year for a household in which two or
more adults reside, or
(2) 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult
residing in the household.
Both the '98 and '99 vintage came out wonderful, dry, very fruity and about 12-13% alcohol. The '99 appears to be slightly lower in acid which is an improvement over the '98. The '98 vintage was submitted to the state competition and received 4th place. Two bottles of the 1999 vintage were submitted to the New York State Fair Home Wine Competition. As you can see on the main page, I received a silver medal on August 31, 2000. To see the official certificate, click on the award winning bottle of wine.