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Donovin Winery Bottles its First Wine
Our First Batch of Homemade
Wine is Bottled and Aging in the Cellar
By Mark
J. Donovan
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Today we bottled our first 5 bottles
of wine. The wine and the bottles look fantastic, and more importantly the wine
sample tasted great. It’s been about a 3 month process of fermenting and racking
the wine, but it’s been fun and I believe we have a quality tasting wine.
Last spring after visiting Napa Valley, California, my younger son and I decided
to try our hands at making homemade wine. We chose not to buy one of those
pre-packaged wine kits and do a little of our own experimenting.
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I got ahold of a wine making book
and did some serious reading and research. We then bought some red
grapes, pressed them, poured the juice / must into a 5 gallon fermentation
bucket, added some yeast, sugar and water, and then capped it off with a lid and
a fermentation airlock. After about four weeks of fermentation we transferred
the contents of the fermentation bucket to a 1 gallon glass vessel carboy where
we continued to let the wine slowly ferment and age. A month later we racked the
wine. We simply transferred the contents of the carboy to a second carboy making
sure to leave the sediments at the bottom of the first carboy.
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Today, approximately 1 month later we
bottled the Donovin Winery’s first bottles of wine. A couple of weeks ago we had
added a Campden tablet and a teaspoon of Potassium Sorbate to the carboy to stop
any additional fermenting. In the mean time we collected up some old wine
bottles and thoroughly cleaned them.
To bottle the wine, we started off by washing the bottles in very hot soapy
water, and then rinsed and soaked them in a sink basin of cold water with a
couple of Campden tablets to make sure they were thoroughly sterilized.
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In the meantime we soaked the corks in cold water over
night. We soaked the corks in a large pan of water with a slightly smaller
lid resting on top of them to hold them down. We also added a Campden tablet
to the water containing the corks to ensure they were sterilized as well.
With our clean bottles and corks at the ready we then
siphoned off the wine from the carboy into the wine bottles. After filling
nearly 5 bottles, we used an inexpensive corker to cork the bottles. |
Photo by Mark Donovan
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We had also picked up some wine label paper that allowed us
to develop our own custom label. So after bottling the wine, we printed out
some labels and attached them to the bottles. And with that, voila, we had
our first batch of homemade wine from Donovin Winery. We plan to try one
bottle at Thanksgiving. The remaining bottles we’ll probably hold off
uncorking for at least a year. We’d like to give them a chance to age a bit
more to see if the wine tastes better over the long wait. |
Photo by Mark Donovan
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