It was about a month ago now, but we did step 4 of our wine making process. Soon we will be transferring it to bottles!
Before anything, we tested it and tasted it. It was very distinctly wine now, and pretty clear even before this step!
In the background is one of the beers Brian is brewing (hence the nice golden color)
Here was our set up to transfer the wine into the next glass jug, leaving the sediment behind to further clarify the wine.
Transferring the wine like this is called racking. We were careful to leave the sediment behind.
Then, we added in metabisulphite and some extra wine to top it off. To age the wine more than 6 months, we needed to add a metabisulphite powder to prevent the wine from oxidizing.
The extra wine was added because we needed to be at this level in the jug:
And that’s it! It’s ready for bottling after 14-21 days from this step, and once bottled, we can age it for 6 months to a year or more.
Here are our previous steps:
Step 2: Secondary Fermentation & Step 3: Stabilising and Clearing