Bottling your own wine is a pleasure. The pride of serving your own homemade wine is high. For some people it is very important to have their own wine at the dinner table. In order to keep the wine in proper conditions and maintain its clarity, smell and taste you should know a couple of things about bottling the wine. In this article you will find useful tips for doing that.
Types of Bottles
The first thing you need to do is choosing what type of bottles you want to put your wine in. You should avoid plastic bottles at all costs. This is because it is very hard to sterilize plastic bottles and they may impart the odor with the wine. Also, the controlled temperature is difficult to obtain in a plastic bottle. The best thing you can do is bottle your wine in quality glass bottles.
The glass bottles where you put your wine in should be perfect. They should have no cracks or chips. You should sterilize the bottles before putting the wine in them. One way of sterilizing the glass bottles is through boiling. You may also put them in the oven at 300 C temperatures. If you do that, make sure you do not forget them inside because they will crack. Another important thing is the color of the bottle. Usually, people put white wine in clear bottles and red wine in green ones.
Transfer and Storage
One thing that is very important when bottling your wine is the way you transfer the wine from the fermenter to the bottles. It is said that he best way of doing it is by siphoning. This way you will reduce risks of organisms, air or sediments entering the wine. The bottles should be full, but not extremely full. You should leave about 1 cm from the cork.
In order to properly store your wine, you should cork it accordingly. To do that you will need to have quality corks. The quality corks are cut from a single piece and not stacked together from tiny bits of cork. You also may use synthetic corks. There are many of these on the market today. The synthetic corks are much cheaper than the usual bark ones. However, there are some people who prefer the traditional way. Remember to sterilize the corks by boiling them.
Once you fill your bottles you should leave them upright for a couple of days. After that, you should put them on a side so the cork contacts the wine. This way the cork will create a vacuum by expanding and seal the wine bottle.
After bottling the wine, you should keep it in proper conditions. Proper conditions mean lack of light exposure, free of vibrations and movement and the right humidity and temperature.
The last thing you have to do is wait for at least 6 months for white wines and 1 year for red ones.
