Wine Making - Preparing Wine for the Bottle

Chris Pearmund: Hi, I am Chris Pearmund and today we are here at the Winery at La Grange in Haymarket Virginia to discuss wine making principles both for the commercial wine producer and the home wine maker. What we are going to talk about in this segment or clip is about fining and filtration of a wine, getting ready for bottling and some of the aging aspects of wine and oxygen as it relates to small batch of the home wine making. Basically when wine is fermented, a red wine in this example, we have grapes that we talked about earlier. These grapes are fermented from sugared alcohol. As it's fermented those small particulates of skin and pulp have incorporated within the juice in the wine and are floating around basically. Over the course of time these particulates will settle down to the bottom of the container but there will still be some very small amount of pieces of the skin if you will, inside this wine. We want to get this ready for filtration. Filtration is used to remove the particulate matter as it's fining and if in a red wine, the wine is actually darker when it has been filtered and fined properly without little pieces of particulate that reflect the light out, it actually becomes darker. For a white wine it becomes nice clean and clear. There is a good argument to be said against fining or filtration of wine because you are taking out a lot of little flavor aspects and flavor profiles of the wine, but it is how commercial wine is made.

So, basically what we are going to do is a few things. You want to either remove the small particulate matter in the wine before it goes into the bottle or you want to stop that particulate from becoming sediment. In removing the wine the old fashioned way is using egg white. We will take some egg white and some water put them together put it in a container of this size about half of an egg white, mixed with the same amount of water. Mix it together, put it in the container, stir it and let it settle it for a couple of days. This will basically coagulate a lot of the pieces of particulate and they will then settle out. There are different fining agents to remove different elements of wine. If you have a wine that has high elements of protein, there are things to remove protein levels. There are ways to cold stabilize a wine. The commercial wine making aspects are important here, but not for the home wine maker. They are not important for the home wine maker because the home wine maker isn't going to have his wines sitting on a store shelf for six months at a time, being traveling around in a tractor trailer and going through extremes of temperature. These are the commercial aspects to preserve wine from changing its integrity over the course of time. So back to home wine making. We are going to take this container which we have mixed up some egg white, mixed it in, let it settle it for few days and there is small amount of sediments in the bottom. We are going to take off our vapor lock and we are going to take the clean wine from the top and leave the small amount of sediments and change this wine into the next container which has been washed. You can take a siphon-hose and if you look carefully you can follow the siphon-hose down to about this level. If you put your thumb across the top of it, you can actually start siphoning. When you siphon a wine you don't want to have it splash very much. To minimize splash take your hose and have it long enough to allow no splashing. If you are able to put some CO2 gas in or some Argon gas if something to minimize any oxygen uptake that's a good thing to do, it's not necessary. In working with the hose you can find the end of this line. You don't want to be able -- if you don't want to pick up any sediments in the bottom and as the container fills you can tilt it to the edge as well. But you surely want to leave the sediment behind. Be careful, always clean up after you are finished before ,during and after. On the next clip we are going to talk about bottling itself and testing the wine prior to bottling and have it in a glass to make sure it's of the quality of wine that you want, thanks.