Joy of Home Wine Making (9 page)

I smell the next batch of wine very carefully with my nose to make sure it’s OK before I rack, and I also set out all of the new bottles to be filled so I don’t have to wave the tube around and get it dirty by banging it on a wall, the counter, or the cat whilst rounding up bottles.

B
OTTLES

Always have plenty of bottles around, and keep them clean. The 750 mm and 1.5 liter sizes that can lay on their sides are best. The bigger the bottles, the fewer you have to cork! However, big bottles take longer to age and are not always as convenient as the smaller bottles.

There are many different styles of wine bottles, depending on what kind of grape wine they were originally intended to hold. I try to keep my reds and rosés in dark green glass, and whites in white or brown. I try to use old sherry and port bottles for my sherries and ports.

Champagne bottles should be used when you are making sparkling wines. Never use regular wine bottles for sparkling wines—the bottles aren’t strong enough (more on this in the sparkling wine section).

When I am about to do some bottling, I choose the wines I am going to bottle, and figure out the total number of bottles I will need for the entire session. Table wines usually get more of the big bottles than, say, a sherry-type or dessert wine. Always sanitize a few extra.

Sometimes you can find those little half-size bottles. Grab them and cherish them. They are a nice size for gifts and for very special fortified or dessert wines.

For more tips, see the section in the previous chapter on bottles (Bottling).

B
OTTLE
W
ASHER

This is a little brass gadget that fits on the end of most sink spouts and helps to rinse out the bottles, saving water and time. They are very useful, and don’t cost much. By all means get one!

W
INE
T
HIEF
, C
ORK
S
NATCHER
,
ETC
.

A wine thief is a slightly more sophisticated turkey baster. It is used when you need a small amount of wine to test the fermentation process with a hydrometer (which will be discussed a little later on). You dip the sanitized tube into the must or wine, putting your thumb over the top, and gravity keeps the wine in the tube till you uncover the top. It works on the same principle as a drinking straw (remember when you were a little kid and played with your milk or pop). I used a turkey baster for years, but only for taking out wine, never for anything else. The wine thief is easier, cleaner, and costs only a few dollars.

The cork snatcher is pretty simple, as well. Every now and then you will lose a cork into a bottle. Put the curved wire ends of the cork snatcher in the bottle and fish around; with a little judicious jigging, you can ease the cork back out. Easier to use when the bottle is empty!

M
ORE ON
C
ORKS

Corks come in different circumferences as well as lengths. Use the longer ones for wines you plan to keep more than a few years. Always get the best quality you can find.

C
APSULES AND
C
ORK
F
OILS

These dress up your finished wines and give them a professional look. They come in different materials, from lead to plastics. You can buy them in a wine supply store or by mail order. Capsules and foils are not too expensive, but they do add to the cost of each bottle.

There are some drawbacks for those who store their wine in
areas that are subject to changes in temperature and humidity. For example, my basement is very humid in the summer and dry in the winter. If I get some leakage or mold, I want to know about it right away. Fancy foils tend to obscure such problems and might even add to the adverse conditions.

L
ABELS

You can make these or buy them, but remember, they must have room for the info you need, and you have to be able to get them off again! Wine supply stores and mail order sources have some lovely labels. However, cost quickly becomes a serious factor.

You can make your own by simply drawing them and having them reproduced at a copy center on pressure-sensitive labels. If you have a computer and printer, you can design and reproduce labels at home.

Try to use waterproof ink on your labels (computer printer ink varies in permanency), or, failing that, put clear tape over the important parts of the label.

To remove labels, try soaking the bottles in warm water and scraping off the wet paper and glue. There are many glues used today on labels. If soap and water don’t work, try a household solvent like Citrasolv. Always be sure to rinse the bottles carefully.

D
RYING
R
ACK

I keep hoping Santa Claus will bring me one for Christmas. These can be very expensive. They look like upside-down Xmas trees or chandeliers and are used to prop up bottles that are drying upside down. Our best local wine store has some old wrought iron ones they use as decoration, and I covet them!

Usually I just put my bottles upside down in a cardboard liquor box to drain and dry before storing them because I’m going to be sanitizing and bottling with them wet, anyhow (but it would still be nice to have one).

W
HAT’S A
H
YDROMETER?

A hydrometer tells you how tall your camel is.

No, sorry.

A hydrometer takes much of the guesswork out of winemaking. Hydrometers and air locks are the best things that happened to home winemaking since sugar was invented and glass bottles became cheap.

It looks like a big thermometer—a hollow glass tube bigger on one end than the other and weighted in the big end. Inside or on the instrument are several different scales.

With your wine thief or turkey baster, you put some of the must or wine you want to test into a glass or wide plastic test tube, but not one that is so wide that you waste a lot of wine. You can buy these at a wine supply store.

Gently drop the hydrometer into the liquid, giving the hydrometer a quick spin as it enters the liquid to get rid of air bubbles.

It will float in the liquid.

Now, if the liquid is plain water, the hydrometer will float at a specific height on the scale, which would be 1000 specific gravity, or 0 percent potential alcohol. If there is sugar in the water, the water will be thicker, and the hydrometer will tell you how much is in there. This is called measuring the Specific Gravity, or SG, in the must or wine.

Allowing for temperature fluctuations (the ideal temperature of the liquid would be 60°F or 15°C) and tiny specks of fruit suspended in the juice (you sort of have to wing it, there) you can learn how much sugar is present in the liquid, and therefore how much potential alcohol there is.

This is really useful, because you can add either more water or more sugar to your must, depending on the need. This way you avoid a wine too weak in alcohol to keep well (under 10 percent or so) and avoid having too much sugar in the wine, since the yeast can handle only 14 percent potential alcohol at best. If the reading says you’ve got 18 percent potential alcohol in there, you are going to have a very, very sweet wine if you don’t thin it out.

If you take a reading before you add the yeast, and REMEMBER TO WRITE IT DOWN, and measure the wine at the end of fermentation, you will know how much alcohol is in the wine. Nifty, huh?

If you didn’t take a reading at the beginning of the process, the hydrometer cannot tell you how much alcohol is in a wine. It’s sad, but true. To do that you have to have a fancy, expensive gadget, which only the pros or serious (or rich) amateurs bother with.

The hydrometer also helps you keep track of the fermentation and offers a better way to know when it is done. When a recipe says, “Rack into a secondary fermenter until fermented out,” you’ll know, with the help of the hydrometer, when the sugar has fermented out and you have a dry wine.

It’s best to buy a hydrometer at the wine supply store. If you make beer, you might already have one, but it might not have the range you need for winemaking. Take a look. You want one that measures the specific gravity from .990 to at least 1.160 and that also has a scale for potential alcohol from “blank” to 21 percent or 22 percent. Some also come with the added attraction of the Balling scale, which used to be standard in American home winemaking but is no longer. There’s nothing wrong with it, I just don’t feel the need for three different readings! If you are comfortable with the Balling scale, use it.

Why do you need to see readings of .990 and blank, if water is 1.000 or 0 percent? Temperature fluctuation and specks of fruit, that’s why. All is not crisp and clean in science.

Place the tube on an even surface. (You can test this with a marble or ball bearing. If it rolls, the surface isn’t even.) Put in the hydrometer and spin it a little to get rid of the air bubbles. Squat down and get your eyes even with the
level
of liquid, and see where the
level
is. Water tension makes the liquid bunch up a bit right up against the sides of the hydrometer, so the correct
level
is away from the edge, but not at the sides of the hydrometer.

Here’s a sample of readings from a hydrometer:

Fear not if you feel lost. All will become clear if you look at the hydrometer and play with it in some fruit juice and water. (It’s
your
toy; you can play with it.)

In reality, there are more increments on the hydrometer. On my hydrometer, the specific gravity scale runs right beside the potential alcohol, and the PA scale is done in whole numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. It is easy for me to compare them when I want to.

You’ll notice that the SG scale gives you more accurate reading, but the PA is a lot easier to understand. In beermaking, using the actual SG is a lot more important because of beer’s finicky nature. In this book, however, I will refer mostly to PA because I think it is easier for the beginner to understand. If you end up with a hydrometer without a PA scale on it, you can check the chart above. Most hydrometers from wine supply houses these days have them, though.

If the must is considerably warmer than 59°F or 15°C, you will need to adjust your calculations. The only way I know is to adjust by the SG.

So, if your must is a little warm, your reading will be a little low, and if it is too cool, it will read high. Check the SG and compare it to the PA on your hydrometer. For the most part, as long as the must isn’t over 70°F, don’t worry. It’s accurate enough for what you are doing.

When reading recipes from some books, especially older ones, you may notice that they sometimes leave off the first digit or two when they tell you what the SG should be. Instead of 1.050 they casually say 50.

Sometimes it’s important to know EXACTLY what you are doing. Say, for example, you’ve obtained several gallons of lovely fresh apple cider that you want to turn into wine. You measure the PA. The lovely cider reads 6 percent PA. You know some of that is suspended fruit and the rest is sugar. So, say it has 5 percent PA in it. This is nice for hard cider, but it’s not enough for the wine you want to make. The question becomes how much sugar or honey do you need to add to bring it up to 10 percent PA?

Relax. Be calm. You will need to add about 1 pound of sugar or honey per gallon to get 10 percent potential alcohol in the finished apple wine. Another half pound will give you up to 12.5 percent. I arrived at these figures by using the Pearson Square, which will be discussed later in the section on fortified wines. At this point, I simply want you to know you don’t have to do everything by rote.

If you are making wine with whole fruit, don’t forget that there is sugar in the fruit! Always add the minimum amount of sugar at first, then, as the wine ferments, add a little more. Give the yeast a chance to make use of the sugar in the fruit.