[vintner]

Step 2: Racking: Day 7:
The instructions that came w/my wine kit say that I need to take an SG reading to see if I’m ready to proceed. I don’t bother. I just use the “time/calendar method” that I mentioned earlier. One week in the primary fermentation bucket, two weeks in a secondary fermentation vessel (called a carboy), and 2-4 weeks for the wine to clear before bottling.
Today’s tasks will take no more than an hour. The fancy term for what we’re doing is “racking” which just means we’re going to siphon the wine from the bucket to the carboy. We siphon instead of just pouring it from one vessel to the other because we want to leave as much of the sediments as we can in the bottom of the bucket.
Start by washing, sanitizing and rinsing the following. Your racking wand and hose.



Your carboy



Your bung (rubber stopper) and your air lock.



DO NOT wash and rinse your carboy w/scalding hot water. This will cause stress fractures in the glass. Just rinse out all the soap suds and then rinse 2 or 3 more times w/room temp H2O. I realize a carboy is an expensive piece of equipment. A 6 gallon carboy will cost you about $26, but as I’ve mentioned, your equipment will quickly be paid for through the money you’ll be saving not buying commercial wine. IMHO it’s just easier to make kit wines if you have a carboy. 2 is better, more is AWESOME!



You’ll notice my racking wand has a plastic cap on the business end. This is to help prevent you from sucking up too much of the sediments. It’s not needed, and if you’re on a tight budget you can use a piece of food grade PVC pipe and hose from the hardware store to rack your wine. There’s no need to buy a racking wand from the beer and wine equipment store. Just make sure your hose is a few feet longer than your pipe when they’re connected together. You’ll also see a white plastic clamp on my hose. Again, this is nice, but not essential. You can find them at the beer/wine equipment store as well.
Put a tablespoon or so of Oxi Clean in your carboy followed by about a gallon of warm water and scrub, scrub, scrub away w/a long bottle brush.



Cleaning and sanitizing your racking wand and hose:
When I’m done scrubbing the inside of the carboy I siphon the soapy water into the sink in order to clean the inside of my racking wand and hose, then I run a lot of scalding hot water through them. Sanitize the inside by siphoning your entire jug of pot-meta into your carboy. Use your spray bottle to sanitize the outside, and run some cool water through them. Shake up your carboy of sanitizer for 30 seconds or so then pour the Pot Meta back into its jug w/a funnel. Use your spray bottle of Pot Meta to sanitize the mouth of the carboy, and then rinse w/cool water.



Now, go rinse out your mouth and lips w/Listerine or Scope you naughty boy LOL. Vodka also works to kill germs. Gently move your bucket of wine to a table or desk top. The bottom of the bucket needs to be a few inches above the neck of your carboy which will sit on the floor next to it. (Again, it’s preferable to work over a tile floor for easy clean up.) Tuck a folded up kitchen towel under one side of the bucket to keep it from sliding around as you will be tipping it near the end of the racking process. Put your racking wand down into your bucket till the end is a couple inches off the bottom. Suck on the hose till the wine/must is a couple inches from your mouth. (It’s ok to taste a bit if you can’t help yourself, but it’s gona be nasty so be prepared to spit it out LOL!. Not back into the hose or bucket though!) Close the clamp or put your thumb over the end of the hose, and stick it in the carboy.



Let all the must siphon out of the bucket into the carboy. When the bucket is nearly empty, tip it a bit to get as much wine and as little sediment as possible. At this point, a little sediment is ok, but when you start sucking up pure sludge, STOP. It’s ok if the wine doesn’t fill the carboy. We’ll remedy that later.



Not sure if you can see in the pic, but I don’t let the wine just splash into the bottom of the carboy. I position the hose so that the wine runs down the sides of the carboy throughout racking. This is too prevent to much oxygen from getting into the must. If you give the yeast too much O2, they won’t make ETOH.



Next, I wrap a blanket around the carboy and put it back in the corner where the bucket was and forget about it for 2 more weeks. The blanket is used to keep light away from your wine. Now go clean your primary fermentation bucket and racking wand.
A word about moving your carboy around: A full carboy weighs nearly 50 pounds. They sell items that clamp around the neck of the carboy with a handle to help you carry it around. DO NOT buy one of these. They will create stress fractures in the glass at the neck of the carboy, and 6 gallons of wine makes a huge smelly mess!
See you again in 2 weeks!

[hardhat22]

K+ Vitner.Nice thread.I've wondered if those kits are all they're hyped up to be.We may try one next year.Right now I'm getting geared up to do some muscadine and a first try at a blossom wine.Just getting the logististics worked out on how to keep kudzu blossoms fresh for 4-5 hours in this summer heat.It'll take a while to pick what I need.Guess I'll have to begrudge a little space in my beer cooler,Lol.Drink 'em faster I reckon.Oh,by the way.Some of us are stiffled with a 5 gallon limit on home wine making.That includes must.
Peace

Don: I like the sounds of that method. So no fruit actually gets fermented. That's the really messy part.(Vin)

The week rest also helps the must to blend together. I'll take all ingredients except yeast,sugar and mix together in a large pot with about 2 gallons of water and boil for an hour to breakdown fresh fruit etc.,then pour over the suger in the pail to melt it in easier and add water to bring up to 5 gallons. You sure are right it makes cleaning the large pieces of fruits out a racked carboy after they've swelled up!!!

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to vintner again.

[vintner]

Hey hardhat22: Good to see you around, and thanks for checking out my thread. I'm not absolutely posotive, but I think there are companies that make 5 gallon kit wines. I've heard about muscadine, but don't remember much about them. Is that a wild variety? And what are kudzu? Could you post a pic? I've only made a couple of flower wines. Dandilion which was killer after about 3 years, and crysanthimum which tasted like turpentine when I bottled it 2 years ago. I've been afraid to try it since LOL.
Don: Thanks Bro. Checking out the OSM thread next. Did I cover racking pretty well?

lol i just read the first post last night, just before you posted the racking
up to date now on both , good posts
thanks again for providing the info

[vintner]

YVW my friend. Now you'll have the info available when ever you deside to get started.

[hardhat22]

Hey man.Yea,muscadines are a large wild grape that grows wild everywhere around here and cultivated by alot of people.Makes a great desert wine and I'm told it makes a great dry wine also.I'll find out this time around with a smaller seperate batch.

The Kudzu is the bane of the south.It's a vining plant that was imported to control erosion and can be seen taking over many square miles around here.The blossoms are supposed to be excellent for jellies and wine.They smell like grape and I'll stop occasionally on a summer night and just breath in the strong scent.Better than gardenia.I'm told that it doesn't taste as it smells,though it is a very nice,sweet flavor.Alot of folks here make dandelion wine every year,along with elderberry.Never heard of wines from Mums.Good luck with that.Mamosa wine is in the plans for next year.Alot of work for a beer drinker who generally only drinks wine around holiday gatherings,Lol.

Vin, great job covering raching, espically where you try to keep the air out when racking...which may cause 2 things to happen...it may cause a very slow fermentation to...causeing the wine to "turn" into viniger due to the high oxygen content, PROPS!!!

[vintner]

Well, I took a trip to my local wine and beer supply store today and found that these Island Myst kits are now up to $60, and a 6 gallon carboy is over $30! Fuckers, but you're still only talkin' $2/bottle.
Don: Thankyou very much Bro
hardhat22: Keep us posted on that muscadine yo. My aunt has wild grapes on her property when I visit her every summer. I'm never there when they're ripe, and I've accomplished little more than to just convince her that it's ok to eat them. Maybe one of these days I'll get out there in early fall when they're ready. Now that you mention it, I remeber reading about kudzu, but this is the first I've heard that it was good for anything! Yeah, I don't expect much from the mum wine. It's probably an aquired taste LOL. Mamosa wine sounds good though. Maybe w/lots of raisins!? Flower wines seam to be about the most work of all. After we drank my last bottle of dandelion wine a few weeks ago, my bro thought so well of it that he promiced to help me pick enough for 5-6 gallons of it next spring.
SUCKER!!! LOL
Yall stay safe yo.

[vintner]

Hey guys: Sorry it's taken me so long to post up the next step in this tutorial. Went on vacation before I had a chance to up load pix, and we've been having some PC troubles since our return. Anyway, here ya go.

Step 3: Stabilizing and Degassing: Day 21:

Like I’ve said, there’s really no reason to use a hydrometer unless you absolutely have to know the exact alcohol content of your wine. You can look at the wine and see that fermentation is complete. There’s very little or no action in the air lock, and as you can see, by this point my wine has already started to clear.



This is because the yeast has converted nearly all of the available sugar to alcohol, and a huge % of the yeast has died off and settled on the bottom. This next step is done over the course of 2 or 3 days. Stabilizing means adding chemicals to your wine to kill off any live yeast. Technically, the chemicals don’t kill the yeast cells, they just prevent them from reproducing so eventually they all die off.

We use an air lock for several reasons. 1: to keep dust, flies’ and other pests out of the must. 2: To keep oxygen from getting into the must. When yeast does not have O2 around, they convert sugar into alcohol. A by-product of this process is CO2 which the yeast disperses into the wine at the molecular level. Since CO2 is heavier than O2, it pushes all the O2 out of the carboy. A lot of the CO2 forms into bubbles and escapes through the air lock, but much of it stays dissolved in the wine. Just like there’s CO2 in a soft drink or beer, our wine is now very heavily carbonated w/dissolved CO2 that the yeast produced. We all know what happens when you agitate a carbonated beverage. This is what we do when we “degas” our wine. We agitate it (by any number of means) to drive off as much CO2 as possible.

Now, you might be thinking, “but I like a carbonated beverage”. That’s cool. If you leave some of the CO2 in your wine you’ll end up w/a mildly carbonated wine cooler like beverage, and for the kind of kit I’m currently making (the ready to drink as soon as it’s bottled kind), that would be fine. But, it’s not a good idea to age a bottle of carbonated wine (champagne) for any length of time unless you plan to seal it properly (like champagne is sealed). Think, “blown corks” LOL. Champagne is another animal all together, and WAY outside the scope of this tutorial, as well as the experience of this vintner.

So let’s get started stabilizing and degassing our wine. As you can see I’ve removed the blanket and tucked an old towel around the carboy to catch spills.



You’re gonna have spills. More like eruptions! LOL. Move your wine to a central local in your home. You’ll be working on it briefly, but very frequently over the course of the next few days. Degassing can be done in several ways. You can use the handle of your stirring spoon (cleaned and sanitized of course) and stir it up well. You can balance the carboy on a thick pillow and shake it up. I happen to have a degasser that attaches to my power drill.





This is probably the least labor intensive method of degassing. There are several varieties available at the wine and beer equipment store. I’ve seen DYI models made from the plastic rod that opens and closes window shades. One end trimmed down to fit into the power drill, the other end heated in boiling water and flattened out a bit to form a small paddle. START SLOW! Vigorously stir for a bit till it starts to foam up then let it sit till the foam dissolves away and stir a bit more. Eventually you’ll be able to stir for 15 seconds or so before you have to stop. Try not to waist too much wine



Put about ½ a cup of H2O in a plastic bottle. Add packet #2, the Pot-meta to the bottle and shake it up till it’s dissolved.



Add this to your wine and degas for a while.



Rinse your plastic bottle and do the same w/packet #3 labeled potassium sorbate. Stir some more….



Next, clean and sanitize your racking hose (not the wand) and 2 (750ml) wine bottles. Rack some of the wine into your 2 wine bottles. If you have tasting corks around, cork the bottles and set them aside. If you don’t have tasting corks, put some plastic wrap over the top of the bottles and hold it in place w/a rubber band.



This wine is not for drinking! We’ll be adding some of it back to the carboy later. It still doesn’t taste very good anyway. Now you have lots of room in your carboy to degas, so go ahead and do just that. Degas the crap out of it till you get very little foam. It helps to let the wine sit for a few hours now and then in this process. i.e., while you’re at work, or asleep… When you go back and shake or stir it again, you’ll get a good idea of how much more degassing you still have to do. While the wine is sitting, make sure to put your bung and air lock back in place to keep critters out of it, and re-clean and sanitize your stirring utensil before using it again.

Once you have it pretty well degassed, add the flavor pack.



Just dump it slowly into the carboy. It’s very thick stuff, so go slow and try to get it all in the carboy. Pour some of the wine you siphoned off into the empty flavor pack. Cap it, and shake it up. Dump that into the carboy as well. If there’s room in the carboy, and you feel you need to rinse the flavor pack a second time, go ahead and do so.
Stir a lot more to dissolve the flavoring into the wine. Next, add the packet of clarifier. This helps your wine clear really fast.



Now, with your stirring utensil still in the carboy, pour in some more of the wine you set aside till it’s about an inch from the top and stir well to get the clarifier mixed all through the wine. Dump the rest of the reserve wine down the drain. Like I said, it won’t taste very good.

You can call it done at this point, but I like to degas a little more. I do this by putting a special cap on the carboy and using a “vacu-vin” to suck more CO2 out of the wine.






I put the carboy next to the lazy boy or computer and pump like mad every few minutes till I see very few bubbles anymore. This part takes a day or more. When you’re done, reapply the bung and air lock, and wrap the carboy back up in the blanket.

Now you have to decide where you’re going to be bottling because once you put your carboy there, you WILL NOT move it again. After you add the clarifiers, moving the carboy around stirs up sediment from the bottom and it will take that much longer for your wine to clear. You’ll need a nice open area to work in when bottling. I like to put my carboy at ~ desk top level so that I can sit down while bottling as opposed to kneeling on the floor which is a real pain on my knees and lower back. I take my carboy out of the milk crate at this point too. This makes it easier to shine a flash light through from the back to see how well/fast it’s clearing, which you should do every week or so till bottling day. Don’t forget to tuck a folded up kitchen towel under one side of the carboy just like we did to the plastic bucket in step 2.

See you on bottling day!