The Wine Has Been Bottled!

 This week, DH and I bottled his wine that he'd made from our bumper crop of concord grapes.  It could have been bottled sooner, but staying in the carboy after it was done fermenting wouldn't hurt it any, so we waited until we had a spare evening.

He decided instead of putting it into wine bottles, he was going to use some green Grolsch style beer bottles that we've had for a long time.  This decision was based on a) we typically don't go through an entire bottle of wine the day it's opened and b) he had loaned out his corker and given away our corks years ago when he and some coworkers made a batch of wine from a kit.  By using the Grolsch bottles we didn't need corks (or corker, which he did actually find the night we bottled) and the bottles were a much more manageable quantity of about 16 ounces.

It's been a long time since he's brewed anything (10 years?  Don't remember for sure), and the tube that attaches to his racking cane was in questionable condition when he took it from where it had been stored.  So I grabbed a length of tubing from my maple syrup supplies (complete with plastic spile attached) and he stuck that on his racking cane.  It worked really well and the spile was actually easier to hold in the corner of his mouth to get the siphon going than the original tubing.  Might just leave that spile in with the winemaking supplies for future vintages.

The carboy had quite a bit of sediment in it (brewer's note: next year buy and use cheesecloth for filtering the must in the first two phases!!) and some got into the pail we were racking into.  So, the carboy got rinsed clean, then the wine was poured back in there and we racked a second time; after rinsing the bucket out.  Then DH bottled from the valve on the bottom of the bucket.

Sometimes he got a bottle a little fuller than he wanted it, and so a juice glass was set beside the bottling bucket for him to pour the extra into (rather than mixing it back in).  If the glass got a little full looking, we sampled it in order to make room for more wine from overfilled bottles.

It was an interesting taste; very similar to what we remember his Dad's wine being (it's been a long, long time since the last of that got drank up--his father having died in 1994. . . ) yet different.  DH thinks ours is a tad sweeter, but for me, I get the same initial "wow, that's dry!" reflex when it hits my tongue as I remember his Dad's creating.  It definitely has a kick; it's not a sweet dessert type wine.

I forgot to count how many bottles we ended up with.  We did use up all the green Grolsch bottles we have, plus one larger clear one.  There was quite a bit of sediment that we did a not very in depth filtering of, so that decreased our wine yield from what we'd expected.  Next year I'll have to buy some cheese cloth to filter the must through in the transfer from initial fermentation to secondary; we didn't use any this year and that is probably why we ended up with somewhere in the vicinity of a gallon of sediment-filled wine.

this little place here heritage wine, 2023 vintage