|
Preparing Wine for Bottling
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?).
| Get rid of C02 in your wine by stirring. 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. |
|
|
Wine 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 Easy
Clean. 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 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. |
|
