Filtering, bottling, and corking!

WOW things have been happening, and I totally haven't even had time to sit down and write this. Whew! Remember when I said summer in Georgia is all about the fruit that grows? Well it all comes in to season at the exact same damn time, leaving me scrambling and juggling time and batches. But it's all worth it! So much wine being made in my kitchen right now! But this post is going to be about how filter, bottle, and label my wines to look purdy. Next post will be all about what's bubbling away in the kitchen!

I decided to finish off and bottle the prickly pear and the mead, but to do that, I had to play with my new toy. A Buon Vino Mini Jet Wine Filter, to be exact. I use #2 pads which are the 2nd finest, and have a 2µM pore size. This is enough to filter out almost all the yeast, but not strip red wines of their color. They do have "sterile" pads which are 0.5µM, but that can and will strip the actual color from wines, because the pore is so small.

It kinda looked like a cross between a medieval torture device, and mad science. But the result was fantastic, and I couldn't have asked for clearer wine. This is the mead being filtered, and you can see that even though it's "clear", it's still a bit hazy.

It's not hazy anymore. I wish I'd thought to take a picture of the after, but I forgot to in my excitement.

The prickly pear got almost as clean, but I stuck the intake too far into some of the sediment left from using my fining agents, and it was too much for the filter to handle, so some of the "sludge" got in to the carboy. Notes for next time!



After filtering, I let things sit and settle a bit and then went to bottle. I don't use any fancy mechanisms to bottle, other than a simple bottling wand. If you've ever seen a "pocket pet" water bottle, it operates on the same theory. Something blocks the liquid from leaving until you push it up into the tube. Instead of a small ball, however, it's a spring and a tube. I just set up my normal racking siphon, and fill bottles by gravity.

I don't exactly get all dressed up when bottling, so apologies for the bare feet and ratty t-shirt. :-p The cool thing about using the bottling wand is that I can pretty easily fill each bottle to the exact same amount each time. In order to get liquid to fill the bottle, I have to press the wand on the bottom. The moment pressure lets up, it stops filling. Removing the wand lowers the level of wine in the bottle due to volume displacement. If I fill up the bottles so that they're almost brimming, removing the wand makes the level go down to that perfect level you see in store bought wine! It's so cool!

Boyfriend and I have developed a pretty good system by now. I fill, and he corks. I fill, and as one bottle is filling, I'm grabbing the next empty bottle and placing it down at my feet next to the other bottle. When I'm done, it's a quick switch and I start filling the next (and grabbing the next empty). Boyfriend takes the full bottle and corks and then places the corked bottle off to the side for me to make pretty later. I could do it all by myself, but what's the fun in that? Also, the corking was his idea, and I'll show you why it's totally not a matter of strength as to why I fill and he corks.

Because I have this corker. It's seriously the coolest thing I have in terms of wine making. The cork goes in the top there, and as the lever is moved down, it get squeezed to about the diameter of a pencil. Then the peg on the lever pushes the now smaller cork into the bottle where it POPS back to its normal diameter, and seals the bottle. The platform is on a pretty hefty spring so it takes all kinds of bottles without having to adjust. It's great! (That's a 375mL of the prickly pear on there now, with a #8 cork ready to go).

After all is corked, I usually let things sit for a while before labeling and sealing them up. Most wine and beer stores sell heat shrink caps which look seriously fantastic when used. So that's what happened with the prickly pear.

 My weapon of choice was.... a hairdryer. Hey.. it works. This one doesn't have a guard right at the front, but rather further inside so I was able to stick it on top of the bottle itself to really envelop the whole thing in heat. It takes about 2 minutes per bottle, and really does make things look all professional at the end.

I named this one "Provocative Cactus", though I cannot take credit for the name, or the art that I used on the label. The name, idea, and artwork all belong to Viciously Sweet, and I thank them so much for having the idea that a regular cactus is just boring. But a PROVOCATIVE one.. now that's awesome!

All done! Look how pretty and professional that looks! I've had friends tell me they can't open the wine because it looks too pretty. :-p I tell them OPEN IT because it's delicious!

For the mead, I wanted to do something a bit more rustic and homey. Something that you would imagine would be done to a nice bottle of mead in Skyrim. So instead of the heat sealed caps, I decided to get fancy and go with wax. This turned out to be better than I'd ever hoped, even if it was a bit of a pain overall.

I had to first MELT said wax, which was an adventure, but I ended up just using a tin can (that used to hold green chilies.. a necessary thing when making enchiladas... not that you needed to know what I had for dinner that night, but anyways), and putting it in a pot of simmering water. Eventually, it all did melt, and looked kinda cool.

Next time, though, I need to use a different pot. Still having a bit of trouble getting the wax off that one. :-/

After that, it was a simple matter of inverting the bottle, sticking it in as straight as I could, then lifting it out and waiting for it to stop dripping (pretty fast, actually). Then all done! I put the labels on it (again done by the wonderfully talented Empty Samurai on DeviantArt) and..... man it looks so cool.

I do need to get a deeper can, though, so the wax can go up further. But I think I'll be using sealing wax from now on. I just like the rustic homeyness of it.

All the labels were just printed on sticker paper. Specifically full sheet label paper that I got at Wal-Mart. I just created a word document, and put my created image on it. I then resized the image to be a normal wine label size, and then copy/pasted it to fit as many as I could on one page (about 5). Then it was just careful cutting  to not leave too much white and cut too much into the label itself.

I think they all look fantastic! So excited!