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When I make wine and have a full carboy out in the open I always wrap it in an old towel (in this case, an old “Les Miserables” beach towel we weren’t using anymore).

The main reason I do it is so that the natural light coming in from the window doesn’t interfere with the wine.  If you don’t do this you could fall prey to the following:

1. The colour of your wine could fade
2. The heat from the light could cause temperatures of your wine must to go up and down throughout the day.
3. The UV light could damage your wine

I’m sure you’ve heard that you should store your wine in a cool dark room and not use clear bottles for your wine and this is why.

I was reading the December 2008 - January 2009 edition of WineMaker Magazine and saw a great idea, which I wanted to pass along. It basically takes my idea and gives a bit of a nudge.

Instead of using an old towel Scott Freedman from http://homemadewine.wordpress.com/ suggested using an old t-shirt instead.

It sounded like a great a idea so I gave it a try this evening and it works perfectly!

Think about it, the hole for the head fits nicely over the neck of the carboy (we wrapped it around the neck) and a large shirt is long enough/wide enough to fit around a 23-litre carboy.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy’

I was asked the other day how I clean my wine making equipment so I thought this would be a good topic for my “question of the week” as I’m sure there are others curious as well. So here’s what I do to keep the germs off my winemaking gear:

I call it the “Double Whammy”!

Step 1 - Pink Solution (Sani Brew)

It’s comes as chlorinated pink powder that you dissolve 3.5 g per litre of cold water (5 tsp. per gal). Soak stained equipment up to 48 hours. Rinse thoroughly with hot water. Because it’s a chlorine product you want to be careful with stainless steel equipment and you’ll also want to make sure you rinse really well. I like soaking my wine and beer bottles in it for several days to clean all the “gunge” out of them, especially if they’re used. It’s also great for removing stains from your equipment (especially your primary).

Step 2 - MetaBisulphite spray down.

This is a good sanitizer as well but doesn’t clean like in step one hence why I do both.  I use a spray bottle like the one below as it really helps get you good coverage.  The nice thing about the MetaBisulphite solution is that it is reusable for up to a month.  Note that it has a strong sulphur smell so use it in a well ventilated area so you don’t irritate your lungs.  I typically rinse my equipment after using it but some people just let their equipment drip dry as it won’t be a bad thing if it gets into your wine as it will help prevent oxidization.

Anyhoo, that’s basically what I do to clean my equipment.

Oh … one thing you might want to do is go to your hardware store and invest in a short garden hose that you can attach to a tap as this’ll help you clean your primary and secondary.  I was able to pick one up that was about 6 feet long with one end open and the other with the tap connector. I’ve used it for years and it makes things really easy. Make sure that you clean this out first (i.e. in step 1) so that you clean out any bugs that might be lurking in it as well.

If you’re interested in some more details on how to clean your equipment here are two good resources for you:

• http://www.clickabrew.com/cn-0903.html (scroll down the page and look for “Cleaning & Sanitising your Winemaking Equipment”
• http://www.eckraus.com/Cleaners_-and-_Sanitizers.html (an online store where you can buy some of the sanitizers)
• http://www.grapestompers.com/sanitation.asp (lot’s of great detail here)

If you have any interesting cleaning methods please share below!

- Scott

I spend much of my time degassing my wine, however, one of my readers asked me today how she can add carbonation to her wine so that she can make a sparkling wine.

Here are some quick suggestions that I gave her:

1) Champagne and beer are actually carbonated in the bottle (for champagne it is called “methode champenoise”) so if you wanted to go the natural route so you could add corn sugar to your wine must just before you bottle your wine. This will restart the fermentation thereby naturally carbonating your wine/beer. I make beer in addition to wine and this definitely works.

For example, for a 23 litre batch of beer I would prepare a “primer syrup” by dissolving 3/4 cup of dextrose (corn sugar) in 2 cups of boiling water. Pour the syrup into a primary then rack the beer/wine must into the primary then gently stir the mixture together. You can then rack the must into your bottles and allow 2 weeks carbonation from there. If you want more carbonation add more sugar, add less sugar for less “bubbly”.

2) You can also use a carbonation system such as the Tap-A-Draft that carbonates your wine/beer in the container by adding pressurized CO2 similar to a beer kegging system. I’ve actually seen this one in one of our local wine supply stores and it’s pretty slick. Basically it adds a tap with two carbonation “taps” where you insert a small CO2 cannister (or one CO2 and one Nitrogen cannister if you’d like to have finer bubbles for say a stout style beer). Instead of a metal keg you get an oversized slender plastic bottle (similar to a two litre pop/soda bottle) They are sized to fit nicely in your fridge so that you can easily “tap your keg” and get a drink, while keeping the whole system cold. Typically takes about 5 days from the time you fill your bottle and add the carbonation tap to fully carbonate your beer/wine or wine cooler.

It’s a cool system but isn’t cheap. Expect to spend $50+ on the tap and then another $20+ per bottle.

You can go to http://www.sturmanbg.com/products/beverage_dispenser.asp to learn more.

If you have a different sneaky trick to carbonate your wine, beer or wine cooler please do let me know!

Scott “The WineMaking Guy”

P.S. Here’s an interesting article from WineMaker Magazine that goes into greater detail on how to make sparkling wine that is worth reading if you’re interested in learning more:

www.winemakermag.com/departments/288.html

My goals this weekend were two-fold:

1) Celebrate “Earth Hour” on Saturday - which my wife and I did indeed do (hope you did too)

2) Get caught up on all of those wine making activities that I haven’t had time for over the last several weeks (and I know I’m not the only one in this boat …)

This mainly included:

- Cleaning out our pantry in the basement under the stairs so that we had a nice, dark and cool space to age our wine (we like to “bulk age” our wine in the carboy so that the batch has a consistent flavour)

- Racking our current batches of wine that are in the aging process so that I could get them into our new found “aging room”

I am pleased to say that for the most part I was successful in achieving my goals this weekend, but the experience was even more satisfying then expected as it reminded me of several important things about wine making that I wanted to share with you all.

Why Do We Rack Our Wine During The Aging Process?

Well, the most obvious reason is to get rid of the sediment at the bottom of the carboy as it helps clear the wine ensuring that there is less sediment in the bottle. Now of course if you are a proponent of filtering your wine this is less of an issue for you, but I’m of the mind that if you age and rack your wine properly you really don’t need to filter your wine. This is a personal opinion of course ….

The other (and often forgotten reason) is that racking your wine allows for a little bit of oxygen to be added to your wine, which in fact allows your wine to “breath” - much like when you decant your wine before enjoying it. This should help your wine develop it’s bouquet and flavours as it ages.

Do I Need To Add Anything To Wine If I Plan On Aging It For More Then Six Months?

The simple answer is yes. If you would like to age your wine past 6 months you need to add a preservative to stave off oxidization, which will potentially ruin your wine. To do this simply add 1/4 teaspoon of potassium metabisulphate to 1/2 cup of cool water then gently stir this solution into your carboy (this assumes you have 23 litres of wine).

I’ve Racked My Wine And Have An Airspace Left In The Carboy - Now What?

One of the reasons why we use carboys as the secondary and for aging is that it has narrow neck. This is to help reduce the airspace in the container to limit potential contact with oxygen thereby reducing the chance that your wine will spoil.

You’ll notice, however, that when you rack (transfer your wine from one container to the next leaving the sediment behind) that you’ll have less wine in the new carboy then what you originally had. This is simply because the sediment at the bottom of the carboy takes up some of the volume in the carboy, not to mention the fact that you’ll be leaving some of the wine behind from the bottom instead of risking having some of the sediment transfer over to the new carboy in the wine at the bottom.

You will want to top up your wine in the new carboy to within 5 cm of the bottom of the bung, so the question therefore becomes what do you use?

Here’s what I usually use (and I would be curious to hear what you use):

1) Sterile water - in my opinion though this waters down the wine depending on how much you have to add so I have been moving away from using it.

2) Similar wine to the one your making (either commercial or homemade) - it adds a unique, balanced flavour to the wine. This is what I did today with one of our wines we’re making from an expensive wine kit. It is the Stag’s Leap Merlot so I decided to added two bottles of Casa Lapostelle (a medium priced 2006 Chilean Merlot we quite like) with the hope that it will add a complex flavour to the wine. This was a little more expensive then we expected though as the wine we added cost $16 a bottle. So we’re now in for just under $200 for this wine kit so I hope it will turn out well - we justified the extra expense though as we’re still just over $6 a bottle for wine we expect will rival a $30 - $50 bottle of wine.

I’ve also heard of people making a cheaper matching wine kit to the one they’re making to specifically use as a “topper upper”. Interesting idea!

For our chocolate raspberry port I have purchased a cheap blended port to top things up once I rack it.

3) White or red grape concentrate (usually done with fruit wines) - This are usually included in the fruit wine recipes anyways to add a bit of fruitiness and depth so generally not a bad idea although I’ve heard some fruit wine advocates ask why you’d want a fruit wine to taste like a grape wine? Personal preference I guess.

4) Something else - This is where you can experiment a bit. For our crabapple wine, for example, I added two 500 ml cans of Strongbow dry cider and was also considering adding some unsweetened apple juice.

Which ones are right and which ones are wrong? I guess it really comes down to personal taste and you really won’t know how things turn out till you bottle your wine and try it for the first time.

Sometimes you wine and sometimes you lose but at least you can be comforted knowing that chances are you’ll still be able to use your wine in some fashion regardless. This could be as part of your cooking, as a wine spritzer in the summer (i.e. add Sprite or 7-Up to it) or you can even gussy it up with some drink crystals.

Remember to record what you’ve added and how much so that you can replicate your wine again if it turns out really well!

Anyhoo, just some ideas to throw your way this evening.

I’d be curious to know what your thoughts are on racking (i.e. how often during aging), wine filtering and what you use to up your wine during the aging process.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

- Scott

Well I certainly thought so until I received an interesting email from one of my readers the other day, which asked if you had to add ingredients (such as yeast, bentonite and a clearing agent) to a pail of juice like you do with a typical wine kit.

The reason why he was asking was that he has made several batches of wine using pails of juice, which turned out really well (was nice and clear plus had great “legs) and he didn’t have to add anything to it. He did note though that he left the lid slightly ajar during the primary stage so that leads me to believe that the fermentation was caused by natural yeast in the air (which, incidentally was how monks invented wine in the first place).

I asked him to make another batch using a juice pail and add the extra ingredients to see what kind of difference that will make. I’m curious what the results will be!

Have you had any experience with making wine the “natural” way? If so, I’d love to hear from you on how it turned out!

- Scott