Finishing wine

[jerryd68]

Hi all, great forum,
I am just learning all of this I have made beer for quite some time but this is my first attempts at wine.
I have a few wines in the carboys, I let them all go though primary fermentation is a plastic bucket fermenter and then moved them to glass 3 gallon carboys where they have been for approx 3 months.
2 are grape from my vines
1 is an italian plum
1 is apple
1 is choke cherry
My question to you all is? We should I bottle these wines and what do I need to do other than get the wine into a bottle with a cork? Degas? how do I do it? should I add anything? back sweeten? What do I back sweeten with?

 

[Pumpkinman]

I'd stabilize them with Potassium metabisulfite (meta), as far as back sweetening, do you prefer a sweeter fruit wine? If you plan on back sweetening, you will need to add Sorbate as well, then back sweeten to your personal level of sweetness.
I'd let the wines age for at least 6 months,

 

[Loner]

Two of the more common ways to degas:
Stir like crazy with a drill attachment. Pulse it forward and backwards to avoid forming the dreaded whirlpool effect. You don't want to add more 02 to your wine. The second way being to place it under vacuum until it will hold steady at 22" or so. I run mine up to 25" using a brake bleeder from harbor freight.

If you want to go all in buy the AIO pump (I did). Once you vacuum rack it a couple of times there isn't much left for the brake bleeder to do.

Good luck with your wines.

 

[jerryd68]

I'd stabilize them with Potassium metabisulfite (meta), as far as back sweetening, do you prefer a sweeter fruit wine? If you plan on back sweetening, you will need to add Sorbate as well, then back sweeten to your personal level of sweetness.
I'd let the wines age for at least 6 months,

Thank you for the advice, you say to let them age for 6 months is that in the carboys prior to bottling, or after bottling?

 

[Turock]

Even 6 months is quite early for these types of wines. You can still have significant CO2 remaining at this point, and many wines are not clear and stable enough to bottle in that time frame. I'm a big advocate of longer term bulk aging because many proteins, haze and sediment continue to fall from the wine. These components are unstable, as are certain undesireable esters, bitter components,etc. Given enough time, these all fall free from the wine, making the wine stable.

A good bulk aging time for most wines is 1 year. And on something like plum, you might even find the flavor so much better, because the bitter components fall out, when the wine ages for a term longer than the 1 year.

I don't like manual degassing because you risk oxidation---and especially so if you don't really know where your sulphite levels are. Allowing the wine to naturally degass by itself also gives the bulk aging that you need for the reasons I outlined above. So IF you manually degass---you still need to bulk age. So what are you acomplishing by manually degassing? Putting your wine at risk of oxidation is about all you're doing.

At bottling time, rack the wine to a clean carboy leaving the light dusting of lees behind. Sweeten to taste and add meta and sorbate. Do not add sorbate to cloudy wines--it doesn't work at that point and sorbate should not be regarded as something that stabilizes wine--it does not. Only bulk aging stablizes wine. Sorbate prevents the few remaining yeast cells from refermenting the sugar you're adding for sweetness. The bulk of the yeast cells need to be racked off the wine for sorbate to work properly.

 

[Pumpkinman]

I agree with Turock, age them as long as you can, I'd age them in carboys, not only does bulk aging seem to produce a better wine and give you the opportunity to make small adjustments if you need to (i'll take a small taste and smell test every month or so), but once I bottle my wines it seems that they tend to disappear fast.
The only way I degass is with the AIO Wine Pump.