Our wine, in bottles
We tested the wine again and last night it was ready for bottling. Its specific gravity was well under 1.000, meaning it was now safe to be syphoned into bottles without – in theory – any risk of them exploding.
Bottling wine calls for two fermenters. Doing the same with beer really only needs one, but now that we’ve learnt from our wine-making experience, I think we may do the same with that.
Why two? Because it’s imperative that you don’t get any of the sandy sludge at the bottom of the fermenter into your bottles or they won’t taste good. With two fermenters you can use the second as a barrier between the one you used to brew it and the bottles in which you’ll keep it by syphoning all of the good wine into the second fermenter first. If you accidentally syphon over some of the silt at the same time you can then pour it all back into the first fermenter, leave it a day to settle and then start again.
One thing we did learn from bottling the beer, though, is not to have such a pronounced difference in height between our fermenter and our bottles. When we bottled the beer we had the fermenter up on the worktop and the bottles on the floor. That’s a difference of over a metre, and it had the beer racing out far too quickly for us to cope with. We got it everywhere – all over the bottles, all over the floor and all over us. This time we put the fermenter on a crate and the bottles in a washing up bowl on the floor, just a foot or so lower. It was much more successful and far easier to manage.
In all, we got 23 and a half bottles filled and corked up, and although we could have probably eeked out another three or so from what was left in the first fermenter we didn’t, as we didn’t want to risk introducing any sludge.
That changes the economics of the project slightly. We had been counting on each one costing 60-odd pence, but with the reduced yield and the cost of the sugar it’s working out about 99p a bottle. That’s probably about right. If the supermarkets can pop out cheap wine at £4 for 75cl, it can’t cost them much more than £1 to buy each one. What we’re effectively doing it stocking up our wine shelf at cost price.
The proof, though, will be in the drinking, and although we could crack one open right away it will improve in the bottle, so perhaps we’ll wait until Christmas.
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