a lesson in bottling...

It's time to bottle our Alsatian Riesling! Let's have a little lesson in bottling, shall we?

One large 6 gallon carboy of wine will fill approximately 30 bottles of wine. So this morning, we ran up to the brewshop and picked up two cases of clear wine bottles (clear for white, green for red.) Two cases, of course, is only 24 bottles, so we supplemented with other random ones we had laying around-- the green ones you see below will probably not be labeled and just set aside for us to drink...

The first order of business is boiling the corks. We picked these up from the brewshop, and they need to be boiled for a few minutes and submerged under water for at least four hours to inflate them and make them squeezable enough to push into the bottle.

Then, we transferred the Riesling from the glass carboy into the Primary Fermenter (white bucket) using the siphon. We transferred all the good clear wine, avoiding the half-inch or so at the bottom, which is filled with dead yeast and other crud. Now all the yummy wine is in the white fermenter and ready to be bottled!

Jed siphoned the wine into each bottle- it probably took 15-20 minutes to get 30 bottles done.

Next, we take our boiled corks and put them into the corker-- ours is a basic hand version, there many more expensive and efficient options-- but this does just fine for now. After each bottle is corked, we keep them upright for three days to seal the corks, and then lay them on their side for storage. Technically, we're recommended to keep them stored for 6 months- 1 year prior to drinking, but I don't know if we can wait that long! In fact, we had a bit leftover, so we poured it into a glass that we shared tonight... and YUM! This might be our most drinkable wine yet!

Now, onto the superfun part of creating the labels-- my favorite!