When to bottle?

Bottling now will be a mistake.

It really depends on the quality of the "plastic" containers ( and to a certain extent ,size ---- 1 gallon or 5 gallon? ) but provided you take a few basic precautions then all should be reasonably well. As a first time vintner you will enjoy the end product I am sure. I will try to be brief.

1. It is important to rack into a clean sanitised demijohn when fermentation is complete. Assuming you are in 1 gallon sized containers, crush a single campden tablet and dissolve in a little of the wine. Add it to the clean container and siphon the wine from the old to the new. Take care to leave behind the less ( rubbish at the bottom ) in the old demijohn .
2. Since you are not going to age it for too long it is a good idea at this stage to degas the wine. either by shaking it with you hand firmly over the open bottle or by using some sort of stirrer. This will help in the clearing of the wine. Degassing will occur naturally over a long time but you aint got that much time!.
3. It is important at this stage to ensure the new container is as full as possible -- i.e. right to the neck of the new container --I normally top up with some of last years wine but you can add sanitised marbles or cool boiled water.Wine is best but you might not have any. You can use some similar commercial "real" wine - I do frequently.
4. Cap off with an fermentation lock
5. Move to a cool storage area. Now since you are using some indeterminate plastic containers it is important that your storage are be as clean and free from "contaminating" substances like household cleaning material, kerosene, weed killer etc -- so your garden shed/garage is not an ideal place. Allow space around each separate demijohn and don't crowd them all together. Plastic is semi permeable and has a sort of osmosis effect where its contents may pick up off flavours from its surrounds.
6. Now 6 months is fine but you can bottle before that time. Just keep an occasional eye on your new offspring and sooner than you think you will find that each jar now contains a crystal clear liquid that is just asking to be sampled. You can then bottle. The try and keep your fingers of it for as long as possible!
7. If this is your first season with country wine you will not want to wait any long before drinking some but most of my country wines are 2 years old before I savour them. That wasn't the case many years ago when I tried my early efforts at week 8! ( or was it week 4).
8. You will hear and read of many pitfalls --- but in fact wine is very robust and quite forgiving and I bet yours will be more than OK.

It is a very good idea to read about it. Terry Gareys "Home Winemaking" is good and designed for the US market. Jack Kellers website is overflowing with information and essential reading.

No heresies in the above that I can see. Good drinking.

Jo, while I prefer bulk aging to early bottling and then cellaring, I can't say that the one is better than the other for country wines. It does make a difference in grape, but, as I said, I can't say for sure when it comes to fruit, vegetable, flower, root, and other non-grape wines.

Please read my post on this date under "Glass vs Plastic." That said, I will expand a bit on it.

If you are using those plastic demijohns made specifically for making wine and beer, then I suspect you can age the wine in them for many months. If you are using demijohns used for spring or distilled water or for any other purpose, then you are possibly in a pickle and I would err on the side of caution and bottle them. Just make sure (1) the wines are stable, (2) they are clear, and (3) they have not dropped any sediment (not even a very fine dusting of dead yeast) within the past month. If any of the above have not been achieved, then get busy and (a) rack and stabilize, (b)fine and rack, or (c) simply rack. (a) applies to (1), (b) to (2) and (c) to (3) above.

Jack Keller, The Winemaking Home Page

Something is wrong with my carrier and I can see two others have responded to your post but I can not see their response. So I apologize if I repeat them. I also apologize if I contradict them but then ...

Going since August indicates a pretty new wine for country wine. I would not think it is ready for bottling. You are a new wine maker and you already have 20 DJ's of wine sitting around. BOY you really got the bug bad. That is probably your biggest problem. The hobby is growing faster than you can maintain it. After a few years, one way or another you will accumulate the bottles you need.

Now to some of your issues:

Do not bottle any wine that is still fizzing. This is to invite disaster in the form of exploding bottles or at least a fizzy end product that was not designed to be fizzy. (I really hate fizzy wine.)

Do not bottle any wine that is not crystal clear. It will throw sediment in the bottle and this will give off-tastes during aging and will yield an unappetizing looking wine when poured.

If you have to, go ahead and use the plastic bottles you are currently using but plan to replace them with glass as soon as you can and at least before your next batches. Do not plan to reuse them after this use.

Put the word out to your friends that you need glass gallon jugs and search out any 5-6 gal glass carboys you can find. If you have friends who do garage sales, sometimes you can get them there.

As far as the wines tasting rough -- they are VERY young. Many country wines are down right awful for the first 6 months, year or even two. Then all of a sudden they become glorious. But I would not leave them in plastic for a year or two. I would rather bulk age but in your case, as soon as they are stable and crystal clear I would suggest you bottle them.

Ray

Many thanks to you and the others who replied - although I'm not much less confused, I think I've decided what I'm going to do now! I was particularly concerned about the idea that plastic containers were 'smell permeable' as right now, they're next to the kittens' litter tray (yuk!) - but I sampled the rosehip (which was the closest to the smelly place) and it hasn't picked up anything unpleasant! So - I'm going to bottle everything that is clear and still, rack that which is still but not clear (with a view to fining if they still don't clear - I think the plum, the pear and the parsnip are the worst - must be something to do with 'P' ;)), and leave those which are still active to complete their fermentation (luckily, most of those are now in glass, as I rack from plastic to glass whenever possible).

Next question - best way to wash bottles? I've just been scrubbing 'em under hot water to get the labels off, then giving them a good soak in ChemPro. Takes forever though, and I'm getting a bit bored with it - especially when I've calculated that I'll have to wash at least 120 bottles for all the wine I've got going on! I don't have a dishwasher (well, I do, but it's still in the shop - long story). Any suggestions?

By the way, I thought I'd see whether I could make wine from cartons of grape juice (y'know, just the normal stuff for drinking) - was worried as to whether there might be preservatives in there - but afer 2 days of sitting there not doing a lot, the juice (to which I added some sugar and of course yeast) went nuts and bubbled up through the airlock - 3 times! It's now settled a bit, but is audibly hissing - looks like it's working alright! I just love all this experimentation - and I have to say that I'm delighted with the aforementioned rosehip (which is still a baby, of course) - even though it's so young, it tastes like a decent dry white, with not a trace of 'cattiness' .

Oh, and one last question - when I tried out my new vinometer on the chilli wine - it came out with a reading of 22% - could this be right? I haven't tested any of the others, but that seems a bit high for an ordinary yeast to me. I have noticed that the home made stuff I've tried so far seems a lot more effective (ie, I get tiddly!) than the average bought wine. Is this normal?

Many thanks!

Jo (hic!)

I usually soak in a soap/bleach solution for a while, then peel the labels off and clean the insides with a faucet jet bottle washer sprayer. I tend to only use bottles that have easy to remove labels. I find most European wines have labels that are easy to remove and most Australian and American wines are almost permanently attached. If you have friends at a local restaurant or bar, you could ask them to save you the French and Italian wine bottles. But like you, I am getting tired of washing bottles. For the first time I bought a couple cases of bottles. They were about 80 cents each, so not too much. Much easier than trying to recycle.

Sounds like it will be good.

I suspect your reading is not correct. 22% is awful high and even the so called "Turbo" yeasts have difficulty achieving that level. A vinometer can only be used on absolutely DRY wines. If you have any sugar left, the reading will not be correct. Is your gravity below 0.995 ??

Sometimes lately I have not been getting my point across as I intended. Must be getting old or something. I was not referring to smells coming into the wine from the outside. I was referring to the fact that plastic will develop smells from the stuff that was IN them on first using them that is difficult to remove. After storage, even if they were well washed, they will often take on a rancid odor. But it probably is a good idea to move the carboys away from any garbage or bad smells anyway.

On the grape juice, consider using Welch's frozen juices. Jack has some good recipes. I am starting to use it to add body and vinuosity to fruit wines.

22% is theoretically possible but I don't think I would accept it without knowing the SG drop.

Ray

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