About to bottle, any last tips?

I have:
120L of Dornfelder (pressed late Sept)
85L of Muscat (pressed Mid-Sept)
25L of Riesling (Pressed early october)

We're planning on bottling over the next few days. They've all been sitting in carboys in my cellar since pressing (racked twice each since).

For the dornfelder, we have 25L of frozen juice we kept when pressing that we'll be using to sweeten. The other two we will likely use wine conditioner.

We're going to filter (3 phase) all of them, and add some sorbate to prevent fermentation.
For the dornfelder, I'm planning on filtering the juice before mixing it into the
wine, since this will be done a few days ahead of bottling, should save us some time fighting clogs on bottling day.

Any other tips before we do this?

That's 300 bottles of wine. Wow!

I run out of gas after doing around 30. I'm rather primitive in my set up, but I've got some efficiencies figured out. Only tip I can think of, is get help. A bottler, corker, and a labeler ought to do it. Good luck.

Get a crew together. I have found that 5 people is the perfect number. Here is how I break it down..

1 that sanitizes bottles and hands them to.....

1 that does the primary filling and hands to ....

1 that tops off to be "one finger below where the bottom of the cork will be" and hands to ...

1 - that does the corking, plunging each bottle in a bucket of water to rinse them off and hands to

1 - that wipes each bottle, places into case box, and tapes/stacks the case boxes when full.

I would get all of the filtering, treating, and back-sweetening done the night before. This way, you are ready to start bottling right away. This method will also give plenty of time for a "bottling party" after you are done.

Are you using an AIO or some type of vacuum pump when filtering? My only concern is that it has been at cellar temperatures, and I know my wine aging at 60*F in my cellar tenaciously holds on to its CO2 and is a pain to degas until I get it warmed up to 70*F or so.

I have all of my Dornfelder dry, wonder if I should try to back sweeten a small portion? What SG do you raise it up to when you do yours?

Thanks,

I think 2-3 people is all I need to do 300 bottles in a reasonable amount of time.
I agree with JohnT as all filtering should be done prior to bottling day.

I person uses the pressurized bottle sanitizer and puts them upside down in the 25 bottle cage.


Then it gets carried over to the filling station - all bottles are then turned upright and filled with the All in one wine pump.

No need to check the fill height as all of them are the same. I also want to point out that there is no drippage to clean the outside of your bottles.

Then carry it over to the floor corker station - and cork them all

Then to the labeling and reboxing of the bottles.

I found out that the corker is typically the slowest one out of the operation

First thing I would think of doing is waiting about 6 months to a year for the reds and at least 3 months for the Riesling. You are only 2 and 3 months out from pressing. They probably aren't "quite clear" yet and probably still have a lot of gas in them. I would check the sulfite levels and let them set a while, racking as additional lees settle out.

vacuumpumpman said:

I found out that the corker is typically the slowest one out of the operation

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I stage all my bottles to the left, fill the bottle in front of me, cork while the bottle fills, and put the finished bottle to my right, ready to be labeled. Several steps during one fill moves the process forward nicely. It is the labeling that is the slowest for me.

Thanks for all the replies everyone. I was going to wait until March to bottle, but a bunch of these are Christmas presents. They will keep aging in the bittle.perhaps we will just do the dornfelder this weekend as its the only one that needs to be before Christmas.
The dornfelder was made like a white (not on skins) so doesn't need as long.

I think we have 3 of us so far to bottle.

We want pictures.

montanaWineGuy said:

We want pictures.

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I agree, I would like to see some pictures before, during and after your bottling "excursion"! Good luck and have fun!

I agree with Grapeman -
I did not pay attention to the dates until just now.

I know you want to hand them out as gifts and all - but you would hate to get a call when a bottle top blows off or there's sediment in the bottle.

Steve, Where did you get your plastic DIVIDED milk carton you use for bottling. The handles make it SO MUCH easier to move and carry than fighting the slippery cardboard ones!! Henry

gaboy said:

Steve, Where did you get your plastic DIVIDED milk carton you use for bottling. The handles make it SO MUCH easier to move and carry than fighting the slippery cardboard ones!! Henry

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That is a restaurant glass dish washing rack - I got as a gift -

I did look on Amazon and came up with this one - identical specs and all -
roughly 20 x 20 x 7 - holds 25 bottles and they all stack on top of each other

It does mention case of 4 - not sure if that price is for 4 of them ? I would send the buyer a question on that

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002P6JGSY/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

I do recall them for cheaper shipping - please look around or see if there is a restaurant supplier in your area

Learned one lesson last night, trying to filter the grape juice we had frozen a few months ago was a bad idea.
Even though we had it go through a fine sieve when pressing, and I ran it through cheesecloth last night before trying the coarse filter in the machine, it's just way too thick. I wasted about 3L of juice trying to get it to pump and having it squirting out everywhere. The filters were totally clogged and I didn't get anything out of it.

So I'll add it to the wine first and let it settle for a couple of days and then try again. I have some packs of Chitosan/Kieselsol, If I do those (Chitosan) first then the other one the next day) right after sweetening, is that OK?

And here is a pic of what I have "before"
1 carboy of riesling on left, then the Muscat, then the Dornfelder.

We bottled the dornfelder tonight, ended up with 12 cases exactly.

Went pretty well, I did the filtering ahead of time. Sulfite levels were down to approx 15ppm after filtration, so brought them back upto 35ppm for bottling.
This one is a low alcohol, high sugar wine (7%).

I'll hold off on the other two for a couple months.

We have a saying here at WMT...

Pictures or is never actually happened..

I see that you are new here, so I guess we will let you slide this time...

seriously though, that's great. Now you only need a nice wine rack.

Might I suggest.. (mods: feel free to delete if offensive)

JohnT said:

We have a saying here at WMT...

Pictures or is never actually happened..

I see that you are new here, so I guess we will let you slide this time...

seriously though, that's great. Now you only need a nice wine rack.

Might I suggest.. (mods: feel free to delete if offensive)

Click to expand...

That rack looks like it's able to handle a couple of 1.5L's.

So a bit of an update.
When we bottled, we had a bucket of "leftovers", mostly runoff from the filter. There was about 8L of it, so I decided to bottle it (one of the 12 cases mentioned above). We marked those ones as "weak" since they had some extra water in them, and planned to use them for cooking for mixed drinks.

I was in the cellar last weekend and heard a pop. One of them was gushing foamy wine out. I saved 3/4 of that bottle and used it in a brine for a pork roast (still tasted fine, just sparking). Noticed two other of those 12 have popped already.
So far it seems just those weak ones are doing this. I opened a bottle of the regular batch and it hadn't restarted fermenting. I'm guessing we forgot to put sorbate in these ones or not enough KMS.

One final update, we had about 10 bottles in total that started refermenting out of the 140ish bottles. A few of them had corks pop out, but the rest turned into a nice sparking wine. The original wine was way too sweet for my tastes, but the sparking stuff tastes nice.

This years batch we made even sweeter but those I back sweetened almost a month before bottling and made sure sulfite and sorbate were done properly. After a month in carboys no change in SG so seemed stable. Did sulfite levels at 50ppm this year instead of 35 for bottling. Will see in 6 months if it worked out.