Preparation, bottling, storage and aging of wine in bottles

Bottling the wine

In home winemaking, you have to be less picky and pour wine into the bottles you have. However, if you plan to keep wine for a long time, you should buy wine bottles that are more durable and can be corked with longer corks. For white wines, you should take white glass bottles, either slightly yellowish or greenish, while for red wines, use bottles made of darker glass of green-brown color.

Before filling, the bottles must be thoroughly washed with hot water and soda and then rinsed several times to make them absolutely clean and odorless.

Fill containers with wine using a food funnel made of glass, plastic, clay. The bottles should be filled so that there is no more than 1-2 fingers of space between the wine and the cork (t. etc.). е. 1-2 cm).

After filling the bottle with wine, it should be sealed with new, unused corks that have not been in use. In no case should old, old corks be used for this purpose, because such cork can spoil good wine in a short time. Cheaper so-called beer short corks can be used to store wine for a short period of time - so-called beer short corks. But for longer storage and for aging wine in bottles, you should buy longer wine corks.

Before corking, the corks should be steamed in boiling water until softened and then driven into the neck of the bottle with a corkscrew.

After corking, the surface of the cork and the neck of the bottle should be wiped dry with a cloth and then fill the cork with molten sealing wax, resin, var or wax so that the wine does not evaporate through the pores of the cork.

Then, on each bottle of wine, especially the one that is stored for a long time, you should put a label indicating the type of wine, the time of production and the time of bottling, so that later it will be easier to find the desired type of wine.

Preparing wine for bottling

Before bottling the wine, it should be cleaned of any turbidity, although not visible to the eye. This is primarily achieved by straining or filtering.

For small quantities of wine

Filtering wine in small quantities is most easily done by passing the wine through a white blotting (filter) paper folded in a funnel and placed in a glass funnel. But such straining is very long and time-consuming. Moreover, the wine is heavily exhaled, because a lot of alcohol evaporates from it, which makes it weaker and less durable for storage.

Flannel or napkin cloth

A conical-shaped bag is sewn from flannel or canvas and hung from goats or four legs of an overturned stool, and a bucket or bowl is placed under it. The bag can be filled with various filter elements.

Sometimes wine, despite the fact that it is fully ripe, still remains cloudy. This is often observed in wines made from many fruits and berries (pears, plums, cloudberries) and depends on the fact that the dead yeast fungi have broken down into tiny particles, so small that they cannot settle. In such cases, it is necessary to pre-clean the wine, which is called clarification or pasting of the wine.

Wine clarification means the addition of various substances to wine that cause this cloudiness to settle to the bottom of the glass.

For this purpose, different substances are used for different wines: gelatin or fish glue is added to white wines, chicken protein to wines with a tart taste, and tannin or fish glue to wines with a low or non-astringent taste.

When one of the above substances is added in the correct proportion, flakes are formed in the wine, which gradually settle to the bottom of the dish. If an insufficient amount of clarifying agent is added, flaking and thus clarification does not occur. With an excess of clarifier, wine is sometimes not clarified at all, and can even become even more cloudy. Therefore, in order to avoid any mistakes, it is better to first conduct several experiments with different substances and their proportions, and then choose the one that best clears the wine and, at the same time, does not change its taste and color at all.

Ready-made recipes for clarifying wine

1. Clarification with gelatin

   One of the best ways to clarify wine. For 100 liters of wine, take 10-15 g of gelatin, soak it for a day in cold water, which is drained 2-3 times during this time. Then drain the water and dissolve the swollen gelatin in warm water or in heated wine, then pour the solution into a wine glass, stir well and leave it alone for 2-3 weeks until the wine is sufficiently clarified and all the cloudiness picked up by the gelatin settles to the bottom of the glass...

2. Clarification with fish glue

   For 100 liters of wine, take 1.5-2 grams. good catfish glue, it is soaked in cold water, often changing it, until the glue swells. Then pour warm wine on it and stir it so that the glue is perfectly dispersed.

   The resulting glue solution is filtered through flannel to remove any undissolved pieces and all kinds of impurities, after which it is poured into a container with wine, stirred well and left alone for 2-3 weeks, during which the wine will be well clarified.

3. Clarification with egg white

   For 100 liters of wine, 2-3 chicken whites are taken, which must be absolutely fresh and carefully separated from the yolks. Proteins with a little water are whipped into a foam, thoroughly mixed with a small amount of wine and then poured into the wine container, where everything is well mixed. And in this case, wine clarification takes 2-3 weeks.

4. Clarification with tannin

   It is carried out in cases where the wine contains little acid or has no astringency in taste. To clarify wine with tannin, first of all, 10 grams are taken. of the purest tannin (which can be obtained at the pharmacy), dissolved in 1-2 liters of distilled water, allowed to settle, after which it is filtered through filter paper and, having poured into a bottle, stored until use.

   Before clarifying wine in this way, it is necessary to make several experiments to determine how much of this tannin solution is required for a given wine. To do this, take 3-4 bottles of white glass, pour 1/2 liter of wine into each and then add, for example, 1 teaspoon of tannin solution to the first bottle, two spoons to the second, three spoons to the third, and four spoons to the fourth...

   After plugging the bottles with corks, they are left alone for 6-7 days, after which they are inspected and then noticed in which bottle the wine is well clarified and the cloud has settled. Then, according to the amount of tannin added to this bottle, as many teaspoons of tannin solution are measured out as necessary to clarify the entire wine. The measured amount of tannin solution is then poured into the wine container, stirred and left alone for 7-10 days, after which the wine will clarify and become completely transparent.

   [/banner_vtexte2] {banner_vtexte2} [/banner_vtexte2]

5. Clarification with casein

   To this end, for each liter of wine, add a teaspoon of cow's milk, preferably skimmed, mix thoroughly and leave for several days.

   The wine clarified in one way or another should be drained from the sediment that has settled to the bottom of the container with a rubber tube (siphon), poured into a cleanly washed container and allowed to stand for another 3-4 weeks, because although the wine is absolutely transparent to the eye, in fact, it still contains numerous disturbing particles, which will then settle in the bottle and form a coating on the walls or on the bottom... Only after all of them have settled can you start bottling the wine.

Storage and aging of wine in bottles

Before drinking, bottled wine should be stored in a cool, dry cellar or crawlspace, with a temperature of 6-8°C for white wines and up to 8-10°C for red wines. A lower temperature will not harm the stored wine to prevent it from freezing. Higher temperatures, especially for light table wines, are quite dangerous, as the wine can ferment and spoil. Strong, dessert and liqueur wines can be stored in a warmer room.

It is always necessary to store bottles of wine in a lying down position so that their corks are always wetted with wine from the inside. Only under this condition do the corks always remain fully elastic and seal the bottles tightly. When storing wine bottles vertically, the corks dry out quickly, are eaten away, and the bottle seals become loose.

When storing wine in bottles for aging, the temperature of the cellar is especially important for the success of the wine bouquet formation. The temperature regime is indicated above. You should also make sure that the fermentation process is complete.

Update: 24.08.2021

Category: Wine and Vermouth