Wine Making - Testing and Bottling

Chris Pearmund: Hi, I am Chris Pearmund here at the winery at La Grange in Haymarket Virginia and today we are talking about wine making, commercial wine making, home wine making, how they relate to each other and what we are going to talk about in this clip is how to bottle your wine now that we have made it. There are a couple of different elements you want to be aware of before you bottle your wine and we will go through a quick simple bottling for the home wine maker as well. One thing that's important is the Potassium Metabisulphite or Free Sulfur in wine. Free Sulfur on the back label of wines in this country called Sulphides is a antioxidant. It helps to protect the wine from oxygen, spoilage as well as microbial spoilage that can occur in a wine. We normally measure wine at about 30 parts per million, a very, very fine small amount and nothing to be a harmful. It's used in many different products in our food industries. So take a sample, one uses a wine thief, not like my brother the wine thief, but this little piece of glass will go into your wine container and basically act like a straw from where you can take the wine out and it will hold until your release your finger and you are able to have your wine sampled. Of course the most important part of tasting wine is the wine yourself, does it smells right? Does it tastes right? If you want to change the wine, you can change it before it goes into the bottle, you can't change much after it goes into the bottle. What we are going to do is test the wine for free SO2 or free sulfur, but rather than using this red wine that we have been working on I am going to use the white wine. It's a lot easier to work with. To show you how this works. The product that we are going to use is from CHEmetrics, it's Titrets which will measure many different things and this particular one who measure free SO2.

Basically this is a vacuum with a chemical agent, will break off the little piece of glass too bring in a small amount of liquid. The blue will show that the chemical reaction is working. We are going to take in more liquid until the blue disappears and becomes clear that would be kind to stop. So the vacuuming or bringing in liquid will bring a small amounts of liquid until it becomes clear. Not that the liquid is clear there are stratifications to let us know that this wine is at 30 parts per million free SO2. A very safe place for a wine and ready to bottle. Now that you spent time and money last six month making your wine, now it's time to bottle it. Bottling wine it's very simple, you want to take clean glass, you want to make sure it's has been rinsed well on the inside, any cardboard, dust or any particulate matter is not into there. The wine's been filtered you checked your free SO2 and you are ready bottle. A simple siphon tube, there are many other different bottling opportunities is out there if you want to spend some extra money at this process. But I wanted to show you the simple step first. When you put a cork into a bottle of wine, you want to make sure that there is room for your cork and there is some room for air space as well. In this type of corker you are going to be compressing the cork and forcing the cork into the bottle. There will be a lot of compression of air here. So you don't want to lay the bottle down and you do want to leave air space to absorb that compression. So as we place the bottle into the corker, place your jaws, if you are corking through the jaw, it compresses and you slide the cork into the bottle. As easy as that. You want to make the cork level have a little air space and now you can let it wait for a little while. If you would like to keep your bottle at an angle either sideways or upside down to keep the cork moist, but why don't you wait a day until that happens to make sure that any compression of gas here can escape. Now that we have worked so hard in making some wine its time for the most important bid, to appreciate all the love and effort and passing into making what I think is the world greatest product cheers.