I recently bottled some Cru Select White Chocolate Port I had aging in the cellar and I thought I would take the opportunity to describe my bottling process.

First, make sure your wine is done! I usually leave my wine bulk age in carboys for at least 6 months. This gives the wine time to finish, clear and out gas. These conditions are important for a good bottle of wine. If wine is bottled cloudy it will clear in the bottle and leave sediment in your bottles. If you bottle before the wine is finished fermenting, it will pop the corks out of the bottle and wine will be on the floor! ( Elderberry wine is hard to remove from carpet!) If wine is bottled before it has out gassed, there will be off smells in the wine. Make sure the wine is finished fermenting, clear, and smells good before bottling.

So the wine is done, the next thing to do is clean and sanitize your bottles. I use a sulfite solution to clean my bottles, but you can also use B-Bright or Star-San. I make my sulfite solution with 1 once of Potassium Metabisulfite in 1 gallon of water. (This mixture will smell of sulfur, so don’t take a big whiff.) I fill each bottle with this solution, leave it sit for a couple of minuets, then pour it into another bottle. You can reuse this solution as long as it looks clean and smells like sulfur.

While I am sanitizing my bottles, I have my corks soaking in some water. 1 gallon of wine will fill 5 of the standard 750ml wine bottles, so I soak 5 corks for each gallon of wine. Make sure all the corks are covered with water. I soak mine in a Tupperware bowl with the lid on to keep the corks from floating.

Next I rack the wine into the wine bottles. I use an auto-siphon and bottle filler, but all you really need is a piece of hose that is only used for racking wine.

After he wine bottles are filled, I cork the bottles. I have a hand corker, and I place the wet corks into the corker, place the corker on the bottle and push the corks into the wine bottle with the hand corker.

I leave the bottles stand upright for three days so the corks dry and seal the bottle. After that, I lay my wine bottles on their side in the cellar. That is all there is to bottling wine!

Enjoy!

August 18th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

RJ Spangles sells a White Chocolate Port wine kit that is very good, but expensive. I plan on trying to create something similar using a bit of creativity. I am starting with White Niagara frozen grape juice as a base. I used my Frozen Wine Concentrate recipe to start. My LHBS has chocolate flavoring for wine. I also purchased some raspberry flavoring from them. Once the wine is finished fermenting, I plan on flavoring that wine with these additives. I will do bench trials to determine the proper amount to add, so stay tuned!

July 22nd, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, Wine Making | Comments Off

It has been a long time since I made a post here. I just wanted to update you on what has been going on with this site. I’ve FINNALLY finished my house and we have moved in! Yea!Since we are finally getting settled, I hope to be doing more with my blog. I have lots of plans, I just need to spend the time implementing them.

One thing I wanted to talk about today was a visit to Adam’s County Winery in Gettysburg. I had to attend a business trip there and the Miss’s and I decided to visit a local winery. They had some very good wines, but the one that impressed me the most was their Apple Wine. The fragrance of this wine was superb! I knew It was apple wine just by the smell. It had a nice balanced apple flavor, but it was the nose that impressed me.

I make apple wine every year, but it does not have the quality of fragrace that the Apple Wine from Adams County Winery. I now know how I can improve my own apple wine. Unfortunatly, I could not speak with the owners to find thier secret. I did learn that they use Golden Delicious and Macantash apples, so I will start there.

This brings me to my lesson for the day. Try different wines than yours. You will be surprised about what you can learn about your own wine making by sampling other wines. A local winery is a good place to start. They usually let you sample a few different varieties of wine. By trying something different, you can learn more about being a better wine maker. Enjoy!

May 26th, 2009 | Tags: Add new tag, winery | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

Last Saterday, Jan 24, we had another wine class at the Porter House Brew Shop. It was a good class and I am happy to be back teaching after the holidays. The number one thing I try to pass on to my students is to keep EVERYTHING that touches the wine sanitized. Bacteria and wild yeast are everywhere and they can spoil your wine if you are not careful. Some people think that the alcohol in the wine is enough to keep everything clean. That isn’t the case prior to fermentation. So make sure everything is sanitized from the time you start until the wine is in bottles.

If you think the alcohole in wine is enough to keep it from spoiling, leave a glass of wine on your counter for a couple of weeks. I seriously doubt you would want to drink it after that long.

Enjoy your wine.

January 30th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

My next batch of wine is going to be a grape\cranberry mix made from Welches frozen juice concentrate. I have 4 cans of Welches frozen grape juice concentrate and 4 cans of Welches frozen cranberry juice concentrate. We got these from Giant Eagle, but any grocery store should have them. The key with using frozen concentrate is to read the ingredients. You want to make sure there are no preservatives. The grape juice ingredients include “Grape juice concentrate, Grape juice, citric acid, ascorbic acid”. That’s it, no preservatives. These 8 cans will make 5 gallons of wine.

I will add boiled water to these cans to make 4 gallons. I will add enough sugar to get my PA reading to 10-12%. I will then add enough water to bring this volume to 5 gallons if needed (The sugar will add a certain amount of volume to the must). I will then test acid and adjust as needed. I will also need to add yeast nutrient and campdom tablets before pitching yeast.

I will add this recipe to the recipe section for your convineance.

November 30th, 2008 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

Last night, October 25, I taught a fruit wine making class at the Porter House Brew Shop. We had a great time talking about how to make home made wine and tasting samples. One of my students brought in some Tomato Wine. It was far better than the Tomato Wine I made! I showed my students how to make an Apple Cider Wine. This is one of my favorites. I usually make a couple of batches every year. My father has his own fresh apples pressed into cider every year and I make a couple of batches of wine from his apple cider.

One thing I tell my students is that wine making is part art and part science. The science part is taking measurements and adjusting the must based on those measurements. The art part is not sweating the small stuff and just make the wine.

When you taste you must it should taste sweet. You should also be able to taste the acid in the must. As long as you kept everything sanitized, pitch your yeast and have a glass of wine. Relax and enjoy yourself. If it feels too much like work and not enough like fun, what is the point?

I really enjoy teaching these classes. They don´t feel like work, the feel like fun. If I could only make enough money teaching them to pay all my bills, I could quit my day job!

Enjoy a glass of wine!

October 26th, 2008 | Tags: Add new tag, wine classes, Wine Making | Category: Wine Making, wine classes | Comments Off

So you want to make some wine on a budget? Well, you have to think outside of the box, the wine kit box that is… what I am talking about is making wine from fruit. You can use just about any fruit to make some wine. The key to saving money is not spend a lot on fruit. You can do that a couple of ways.

1. Grow your own.
2. Get someone to give you some fruit.
3. Buy dead ripe discounted fruit from the grocery store.

The first two, I think, are self explanatory so I will focus on the third.

If you check your local grocery store late at night or early in the morning, occasionally you can find fruit that they have discounted because it is so ripe it is ready to spoil. You can buy this fruit and freeze it for later. Of course you want to check for bad spots first and cut them out. The point is that it won’t take long to get 10 to 15 pounds of fruit to make a 5 gallon batch of wine. That’s 25 bottles of wine! If you spent $25 for fruit and other additives, that’s a cost of $1 a bottle! And this is for home made wine you can’t buy in a store!

Stay tuned and I’ll show you make you own fruit wine!

October 17th, 2008 | Tags: frugal wine, Fruit Wine, making fruit wine | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off