Mike---On the glass spheres, you use them to take up the space like Arne said. We have a siphon hose with a curved wand on the end and it works well to keep the siphoning wine away from the marbles. We use lots of marbles. Whatever wine we can't siphon off safely gets placed in a small wine bottle or jug. When we bottle, we're doing quite a big session and all the leftovers go into the same bottle. We allow it to clarify again and bottle it later. You make some interesting blends by saving all your leftovers this way.
The dollar store has lots of 1 pound bags of these spheres for $1.00 per bag. Just be sure they aren't metallic coated---colored glass is OK, just not the coated ones. Throw them in some SO2 to clean, then add them to top up.
The reason topping up is important is to limit the size of area that is exposed to O2. A carboy not filled to the top has all that space where O2 is contacting the wine. At the neck, it's very small. You don't want your wine to oxidize. Remember--as the wine ages you no longer have the protection of the pressure from CO2 from the ferment.
Don't forget to hit the recycle center, if you have one, to pick up bottles and jugs. Those large wine bottles make good secondary fermenters too. Just get yourself some #2 corks to fit them with an airlock. #2 cork fits all wine bottles.
No Mike, you will never see a recipe for wine without water. It would be way too hard for a beginner to understand because making wine this way is "off-recipe." We make many different kinds of fruit wine and the flavors were never what we expected them to be. In 2005, we began a program of changing the way we made wine. The biggest change was to stop using water. We freeze all the fruit first--that gives you a lot of juice to work with. We bag the fruit, throw it into the fermenter and let it thaw. Now this is where it gets a little hard until you do it a couple times--you have to estimate how many gallons of wine you'll get from the must. As an example, it takes 1 1/2 bushels of grapes to get 5 gallons of wine. 40 pounds, or so, will get you about 5 gallons. One year we had 180# of blackberries and that made 15 gallons of wine. So once you figure out how many gallons of wine you'll have, you use that to adjust your chemistries--nutrient, calcium carbonate or acid blend, etc.
Because you have little juice, you'll have to use a graduate to put some juice in to float your hydrometer for sugar addition to adjust brix. But as easier way is to use a refractometer because it only takes one drop of juice.
We use a PH meter instead of doing TA. You really need to get your PH adjusted at the primary when making fruit wines. We hate doing any acrobatics at bottling time---so we spend lots of time at the primary designing the wine there.
Many beginners use water for PH adjustment---don't do it. Use calcium carbonate instead. There is only one person who made water into wine, and I guarantee that the rest of us can't do it.
Over the last few years, I've been teaching this "no water" technique to people on another forum and they are all making better fruit wines now and they brag about the results. Give it a try next time you work with fruit---your wines will go to a new level, and all your fruit wines will taste like the fruit they're made from--instead of tasting like wine. Yep--it's expensive. If you can't pick your own free fruit then just begin by eliminating how much water you use. As you cut it down, even those wines will improve.
