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BOTTLING YOUR WINE
Quality makes all the difference. We sell only the finest quality wine making kits from the worlds leading manufacture Brew King. There is no reason for us to carry any other brand. Saving 10 to 15 cents per bottle with a lessor brand just doesn't make good wine sense.
  • 10 MISTAKES
  • ABOUT SULFITES
  • FINING AGENTS
  • GRAPE VARIETIES
  • FLOOR CORKERS
  • GLOSSARY
  • The last step in winemaking is filling and corking your bottles and few things are more important to the shelf life of your wine than how it's handled at this point. This especially true when it comes to preparing your wine to be bottled. The better the care, the better the wine.
    Firstly, your wine has to be finished: clear, stable, and free of C02. Clear means free of particles that could later fallout of suspension and leave a deposit in the bottles. Stable means finished fermenting and with enough sulfites (S02) present to prevent oxidation and spoiling. Free of C02 means that although the fermentation may be finished, a wine can still be saturated with carbon dioxide. If it is, it will go into the bottles with the fizziness intact, and depending on the conditions, could expand and push the corks out (or worse, break the bottles), or provide you with the dubious pleasure of drinking a sparkling wine that's supposed to be still (sparkling Merlot , anyone?). 
    To get rid of C02, stir your wine. When the fermentation is finished, most people add fining agents, and this is when vigorous stirring is called for. Like shaking up a soft drink, vigorous stirring chases the bubbles out and not only prevents the wine from being fizzy in the bottle, but also helps the fining agents to work better. If you're not using fining agents, make sure your wine is free of C02 before bottling.
    You and Your Bottles
    The first thing you need to do is to make sure you've got the right kind of bottles. A standard wine bottle has a neck opening 18.5 mm in diameter. This will accommodate a standard cork. There are bottles with different neck sizes on the market, and you may encounter some as used bottles. In particular, the flagon shaped bottles from Portugal (Mateus) have a much smaller neck opening, and screw-top bottles have a very large neck opening. Also, with screw-top bottles, the thinness of the glass in the neck area makes them unsuitable for corking.
    The second step is to make sure your bottles are clean and sanitary, which are two different things. Clean bottles can't harbor any lurking gunk under a layer of dried wine. If your bottles do have some residue, soaking them in a solution of Straight A and a rinsing with hot water will clean them up in an hour or so. 
    To sanitize, just before bottling, rinse them with a One Step. This will prevent the growth of any spoilage organisms in the bottle. The best way to prepare bottles is with a bottle tree and a spray pump. Used together, they turn a tedious job into a five-minute breeze. For more information on cleaning and sanitizing for the home wine maker, see cleaning and sanitizing.
    Filling the bottles comes next. A sanitized siphon hose and racking cane are necessary, and a siphon filler is an excellent tool for getting the fill levels right. Consisting of a rigid tube and a one-way valve, it allows carefully controlled filling. It also helps prevent excessive splashing and agitation of the wine, which can lead to oxidation.
    Bottles should be filled so that the wine is about one inch away from the bottom of the cork. What this means is that if you are using a cork It inches long, the wine should be 2 inches from the top of the bottle neck. This is important: you don't want to leave a lot of ullage (airspace) in the bottles, but you have to leave enough room under the cork for the compressed air to sit.
     
    Compressed air? Think of the neck of the bottle as a cylinder. The cork acts like a piston, pushing whatever air is underneath it into the bottle compressing it down. If there isn't enough room for the air, the cork could pop right back out, refusing to stay put in the bottle. The care and attention you take when filling your bottles will go a long way to keeping your wine fresh and unspoiled.
    Corks! Corks! Corks! 
    Corks are made from the bark of the cork oak, Quercus Suber. There are persistent rumors that the cork forests in Portugal (representing 30% of the worlds' cork trees) are in danger from industrial pollution, or are hit by disease, or are doomed in some way. This simply isn't true. According to the Cork Quality Council, the effects of industrial pollution are limited to IO% of a single forest, or less than 1% of all the corks in Portugal (that's 0.3% of the world's cork trees). Also, there is beginning to be a reduction in the demand for corks, allowing the home winemaker a wider range of cork choices than ever before. 
    Agglomerated corks are made from chipped cork pieces ground to a specific size and glued together with non-reactive polyurethane glue. Inexpensive and easy to handle, these are suitable for wines that will be held for six months to a year. 
    Synthetic corks are made from inert synthetic resins, and while some wineries have tried them, mainly for short-term wines, they haven't proven effective for all purposes. They have to be put in with a heavy-duty corker, and can only be extracted with a good worm-type corkscrew wielded by a strong hand. Further development is needed before the home wine maker could put them to use. 
    Natural cut corks are just that: simply punched out from cork bark. They rely on the density and elasticity of the natural cork bark to seal the bottle. Depending on the quality of the cork, you can expect your wine to last from 3 years to more than 10. Another thing that comes in to play when choosing a cork is the bevel. This is the tapered edge that some of the less expensive corks have around the top and bottom of the cork. This is to allow easier insertion with hand held corkers. The thing to remember is that the bevel actually reduces the amount of surface area in contact with the neck of the bottle. This contact is what prevents the passage of wine past the cork. If you have a 1 inch long cork, but 1/8 inch is beveled off of each end, it is effectively only 3/4 inch long. 
    How long should your cork be? Which cork is right for you? Look realistically at how long you expect to store your wine before drinking, and figure out how much cork fits in your budget. A good rule of thumb is 'you get what you pay for.' The cheapest cork isn't always the best deal, and if you do decide to keep some bottles for the future, you may find yourself having to re-cork them in a few years. In addition, if you are making a wine kit you intend to drink within the next 6 months, a very long cork might be a waste of money. 
    PreparIng Your Corks
    If you are using a high quality, iris- jawed floor corker there is no need to soak or sulfite any of the corks that Leener's sells. Simply insert them dry.
    If you are using a small, hand-held corker (single or double-lever types) you may need to prepare your corks by soaking them in warm water for 20 minutes. If you have trouble getting corks to pass through your hand-held corker, you may want to try adding 1 cup glycerin to every four liters of warm water that you use for soaking. This ensures that the corks get enough moisture to lubricate their passage through the corker, but they won't be over soak and crumble. 
    While some books talk about boiling and long soaking in sulfite solutions, these are very bad ideas. Cork is tree bark, and boiling it turns it to mush. Mush won't seal your bottles. Long soaking does the same thing. Corks can soak up sulfite solutions and transfer them to the wine. Once you have opened a bag of corks, you may need to take special care of the unused corks. 
    The trouble with handling very dry corks is that it's tough to judge how long you can soak them before they become mushy. However, there is a nifty technique that you can take advantage of, if your corks are brittle either from age or low humidity storage. You can construct a 'cork humidor'. 
    You will need a sanitized plastic bucket and lid, an empty wine bottle, and a 1.25% solution of metabisulphite (eight teaspoons of metabisulphite powder dissolved in a gallon of cool water). Fill the wine bottle halfway with the solution, and carefully stand it up in the bottom of the bucket. Gently pour your corks into the bucket, filling the space around the bottle, and put the lid on tightly. Leave the bucket in a room temperature area for about a week. In that time the liquid evaporating from the wine bottle will raise the humidity in the bucket in turn raising the humidity in the corks, making them pliant enough for easy insertion. The sulfur dioxide gas coming off the liquid will prevent the growth of moulds or spoilage organisms, keeping the corks sanitary. No further treatment of the corks will be necessary before bottling. 
    If you want to store your corks this way, replace the solution in the bottle every four weeks, and keep the lid tightly sealed. That way your corks will always be ready for use. 
    Choosing and Using a Corker SEE USING A FLOOR CORKER
    There are several types of corkers available. We highly recommend a floor corker with jaws that compress the cork like an iris. Other corkers (twin lever, single lever, and compression corkers) rely on human muscles to compress the cork and push it into the bottles. 
    Iris jaw floor corkers, while more expensive, use simple levers and mechanical advantage to carefully compress the corks and insert them precisely into the bottles. Also, they hold the bottles steady in a spring-Ioaded base. They are really worth the extra money. 
    After the corks have been inserted into the bottles it's a good idea to dry the top of the cork off with a cloth. This will prevent any moisture there from forming mould on the top of the cork. While a spot of mould on the top of the cork wouldn't hurt your wine, it does look unpleasant. 
    Dressing Up
    After all of your bottles have been safely filled and corked, you can choose to put capsules over the neck of the bottle. While not necessary to preserve the wine, they give a nice finished look to your bottles, and when coordinated with labels give your wine a professional look. Capsules are often called shrink-caps, because heat is used to shrink the plastic onto the bottle neck, holding it tightly and smoothing out any wrinkles or seams in the plastic. 
    The best way to apply this heat is with the steam from a kettle. At a rolling boil the kettle will produce enough steam out of the end of it's spout to shrink a capsule in only two or three seconds. Be careful not to burn your fingers! While you can use blow dryers, they are very slow. Hot air paint strippers work better, but they aren't as fast as a kettle, and are a bit more dangerous to use. In a pinch the heat from an electric stove element will also serve to shrink the capsules on, but again, be careful with a hot stove. 
    You should leave your wine bottles standing upright for at least the first 24 hours after corking. Remember the piston-and-cylinder analogy from above? The compressed air has to work its way out past the cork, and it can only do that if the bottle is standing up. If you immediately turn the bottle on it's side, the pressure will still be there, but the wine will now be pushing against the cork, and could force it out of the bottle. After 24 hours (or two or three days: it isn't critical to do it right away) you should turn the bottles on their side for long term storage. This is when the wine against the cork will keep it moist, preventing leaks. 
    You may notice mould on top of some of your corks after a few months. This isn't necessarily a sign that your wine has leaked through. It could be that a small amount of wine stayed on top of the cork at bottling and has moldered there, Carefully wipe the top of the cork and the bottle neck with a clean damp cloth before extracting the cork, and the wine should be fine. 
    How long will your wine keep? This is a tough question to answer as it depends on so many factors. As long as you keep it safely in a cool (60°F or lower), dark room, with good care and attention to your bottling practices, your wine will last as long as the raw materials it was made from. Better quality ingredients usually mean a wine that will age longer.
    copyright 2004 J.R.Leverentz
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