Twenty Three Bottles of Wine on the Wall

Ok, so it’s a kitchen island, not a wall. And if you count, there are 26 actual bottles. But six of them are half-size mini bottles, so if you’re measuring volume it works out to twenty three.

The blood orange wine is all bottled up! It settled down nicely since Sunday, and we sent it through three layers of filters just in case… It’s a bit harsh, but that’s to be expected. I did a hydrometer check and it looks like we got about 18% alcohol on this batch. It should mellow nicely, and it ought to be quite drinkable by Christmas or so.

The best part of bottling was using my friend Rob’s floor-standing corker. I’ve corked wine before using a hand-held scissors grip device, and it was a painful experience. The floor-standing corker was a dream. We had all of the bottles corked in about ten minutes, with no wasted corks and hardly any effort! If you’re bottling a lot of wine, you need one of these… Hopefully, I can borrow Rob’s again when the next batch is ready.

Last night we were winemaking fiends… After bottling the blood orange and scrubbing out the carboy we transferred the apple wine over and added some pectin enzyme. Hopefully that’ll clear it up. We tasted it a bit while we were doing the transfer… It’s very nice… If it weren’t hazy, I’d say it should be bottled right away. As it is, I’ll give the enzymes a month or two to clear things up, and if that doesn’t work I’ll use the gelatin finings.

And to close out the whole wine-making experience, last night the blueberry wine blew its top. A flake of blueberry skin got into the water-lock and sealed the intake, so the whole carboy just kept building up CO₂ pressure until it blew the stopper out. Fortunately, it was underneath the kitchen table. If it hadn’t been, I would have spent the morning mopping blueberry pulp off of the ceiling instead of wiping the underside of the table…