Bottling Time!!!!

It’s finally time to bottle the wine! We went out to buy some bottles, corks and a corker today then came home to bottle. We already have a bottling tube, from doing beer, so we cleaned that out instead of buying a new one. The bottling tube is a nifty little device that allows you to fill any bottle perfectly. It has a pressure activated valve at the end which lets the fluid into the bottle only when it’s depressed into the bottom of the bottle. This makes it much easier to fill bottles without making a huge mess. The tube is also the perfect size so you fill the bottle up to the rim with the tube in the bottle, then when you remove the tube you are left with the perfect amount of space between the top of the fluid and the top of the bottle. With beer, this allows some room for the bottle carbonization to occur. Most home brewers carbonize their beer by adding a small amount of corn sugar to the beer just prior to putting the beer in the bottle. The remaining yeast in the beer reactivates and ferments this additional amount of sugar. As the sugar ferments, carbon dioxide is released into the beer, thus giving the beer the bubbles of carbonization. For wine, this extra space allows the perfect amount of space for the cork. After filling all the bottles, we used the corker to put corks completely into the bottles, just as any wine you buy from a store is, flush with the top. The corker has two handles that are moved together, which causes a mechanism inside to squeeze the cork small enough to easily slide into the top of the bottle. One the cork is compressed, you simply place the corker on top of the bottle, push down another handle and voila, your wine is corked. The homebrew store also sells foil wraps to go over the end of the bottle. After we decide on labels for the wine, we plan to pick up some foil seals to match the labels. The wine is okay right now, but it still needs to age to bring out the full flavor profile.