Category: Kit Winemaking

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Bottling Your Kit Wine

The final step in the wine making process is to bottle your wine and insert a cork. You’re ready for this step once you wine has been stabilized and is clear.

If your wine has not been properly clarified or degassed you shouldn’t move on to bottling.  Sediment and trapped carbon dioxide cannot leave the bottle and will remain suspended in the wine until you open it. So be completely sure you’re ready for this step.

In this video you’ll see the steps involved to take wine from a carboy to the bottle including an extra step required for long-term bottle aging.

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Degassing and Clarifying Your Wine

After a seemingly eternal fourteen days since racking it’s time to degas and add a clarifying agent to the kit wine.

The wine whip degassing tool.Degassing is a brut force method of removing suspended carbon dioxide. I purchased a Fermtech Wine Whip to help with this process and it saved me big time. More on that later.

Check out this video on degassing and adding a stabilizing agent to the wine. This is the final step before bottling. If this step isn’t done correctly your wine won’t clear and you won’t be able to move onto bottling! Continue reading “Degassing and Clarifying Your Wine”

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Checking the Specific Gravity and Racking

After the primary fermentation has slowed down (after about 7 days) it’s time to check the specific gravity. What this tells us is how the density of the wine compares to that of water.

Grape juice is more dense than water. Thus before we fermented the grape juice the specific gravity was over 1.0. As the yeast converted the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation, the density of the wine has been decreasing. A specific gravity less than 0.990 tells us that the primary fermentation has slowed down enough that we need to rack. Continue reading “Checking the Specific Gravity and Racking”

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Which Wine Kit Should I Start With?

When you first get started with making your own wine it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of decisions you have to make. I recommend you start simply with a wine kit.

Starting with a kit reduces the amount of equipment you need to purchase or rent at the outset. The process is also limited to that of making wine and does not include tasks such as finding grapes, pressing them, or any else besides the actual chemistry of making wines.

Choosing which wine kit to make is also an important decision which is influenced by several factors. Here are just a few things to think about. Continue reading “Which Wine Kit Should I Start With?”