Re: Mastering the bottling phase

I have a wine box, slip the clear empties into the 12 slots, and fill away. Works like a charm.

Rob,

I have used the door of the dishwasher as a base for the bottles as well. It works great, but I've found that I'm quicker working on the floor. I just spread a towel to catch the inevitable overflow and spillage. :-) But there's no need to avoid the bottling bucket! I always rack into a bottling bucket before bottling, it makes the addition and mixing in of metabisulfite easy, and gives me one last go at degassing before bottling.

Well, I use a single bottling wand to fill the bottles, and I just pay close attention while bottling.

I have two wine boxes, place 24 bottles in the slots, and fill with the bottling wand via ordinary gravity feed. Although a little does overflow each time, this is caught by the cardboard box, and backed up by the towel I have on the floor. As I do my bottling inside, in a spare room, I don't have the option of just cleaning the concrete floor. Carpet doesn't clean that easily.

When all bottles are filled, I cork them with my floor corker (now that I have one, I don't know how I ever managed with just a hand corker). I let them sit upright for 2-3 days, then clean them and affix labels and foil caps. I keep track of the wine and its current status via a program that I wrote myself.

I have noticed that the quality of my wine gets affected by poor quality corks. Slowly I am moving to aluminum screw caps. Threaded top bottles are hard to find now. However, French producers are gradually moving to screw caps. I'll keep my eyes open. In the meantime I may experiment with flip flop caps. I would like to find out more about your wine tracking system. Denis Rothesay, New Brunswick

Hi everyone, I haven't posted here for quite a while but I have been lurking and reading whenever I have a chance but I couldn't resist replying to this post. Am I the only one giggling here? Is it a good idea to insert a c*ck in a wine bottle? hehehe! :o) Other than that, there are some pretty good ideas for bottling... Louise

Thanks for your input. If corking suits you fine the more power to you. However, at this end, corking is on its way out. I have had too many bad experiences with corks. At one time, corks were the only thing available to bottle food and wine. The oak trees are getting old and their bark do not re-generate has before. These oak trees have been harvested for hundred of years. The corks available to us now are risky to use.

My words of reccomendation is simply that you don't sample too much of your product(s) while bottling. Bottling takes coordination, and there are those of us who have determined that we simply do not have the full coordination required to do the bottling when under the affects of the glorious products. :)

LG

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (Paul) wrote: