Your Winemaking Educational Source
Degassing your wine is a key step in the final stages of the wine making process. Simply put it’s the process of removing suspended carbon dioxide left over from fermentation.
Before we talk about how to degas your wine let’s take a minute to talk about why it’s so important to get it done right.
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.
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”
Let’s make wine! Now that we’ve covered wine kits and what equipment required to make wine it’s time to hydrate the grape juice and pitch the yeast. In this video I’ll show you everything it takes to get your wine kit happily fermenting.
Once you’ve decided on what wine kit you’d like to make we now move onto what equipment you’ll need to get started. In this video I outline the minimum amount of equipment required to get going. You can always add more gadgets but this is an affordable place to start.
In summary, you’ll need: Continue reading “Equipment Required for Making Wine from a Kit”