Bottling wine

The actual bottling of wine does not really differ in anyway than bottling cider, but the preparations are a bit different. In my opinion making cider is whole lot easier. And cider is a lot better too. If I was the one to decide I would have made only cider from the whole batch of apples. But A likes wine. So we made that too.

On wine it is not important to keep an eye on the gravity level of the juice while it's fermenting. The wine is left to ferment until there is no sugar in the juice, which can be noticed from the airlock. No bubbles will come through the airlock anymore. At this stage the wine is siphoned to another bucket for the first time to get most of the dregs out. Then what is left from the yeast in the juice is killed. That can be done with Potassium Metabisulphite or Potassium sulfate which is mixed in with the juice. After this the juice needs to be shaken agressively to get all the carbon dioxide out from the juice. The shaking is hard work. It's really difficult to get a hold of the bucket that weights almost 30 kg and shake it. I cannot do it for more than two seconds at a time. And that is why A does it. Sorry to have no picture of the shaking, that would be a fun picture.

After vigorous shaking a clarifier is mixed into the juice. Now the bucket should be placed somewhere high to stand so it's easy to siphon after 24 hours. Then it's siphoned to a bucket.. again. Can you already see why I like making cider a whole lot more? 

Apple wine is usually quite sweet, but we wanted to have some of the wine quite dry and also made two other batches sweeter. You could just add sugar to taste or you can measure with the gravity meter to gain the right sweetness. 

Did I say we bottled the wine... I should have said that we bagged the wine. We were unable to collect that many wine bottles and we were also lazy so we bought wine bags. You know those things that are inside the cardboard wine tetras.

We still haven't found any place good enough to store the wine, but unlike cider apple wine does not really require much maturing. So let's get drinking!