Looking for some fantastic Oenology tips for beginners?  Lets look together at bottling the wine.

The time has come when the Blueberry and Raisin wines are ready to bottle.  It is an excited time when you start a project and you get to see it come to fruition!

I started these wines in September, it is only the beginning of the waiting though.  Most vintners (winemakers) will allow their wine to age in bottles for six months to one year.

We have no desire to do that, as soon as we bottle the wine we immediately consume it.  We enjoy having a different variety of wines.  Lets take a look at some Oenology tips for beginners below.

The Important Wine Bottling Process

So I do the following steps when bottling our wine:

1. Wash bottles with easy clean and sterilize them with potassium metabisulphite.
2. Rack wine into clean and sterilized bottling container.  When you rack your wine you are siphoning the wine off of the sediment (lees).  It is the byproduct of the fermentation process.
3. Bottle and cork.
4. Newly corked bottles must stay upright 3 to 4 days before laying them on their side.  This will allow the cork to expand and give a tight seal after being inserted.

I started bottling the blueberry wine.  The bottles are clean and ready to be filled.  I rack the blueberry wine into the bottling container and I  tweak the wine if needed.

Then I add sugar to sweeten the wine and add potassium sorbate so the wine will not re-ferment with the added sugar.  Then I also will add two campden tablets to help ensure that we have no wild yeast regrowth after bottling.

Next, I add a package of super smoother, which makes the wine more palatable.  This will help with the taste of the wine if we start drinking it before allowing the wine to age six months to a year.  The wine batch gave me twenty seven bottles.

I then bottled the Raisin wine.  Again, the bottles are clean and ready to be filled.  It is now time to rack it over to the bottling container and the Raisin wine needs a little more tweaking.

The Interesting Fermentation Process

The wine stopped fermenting before it was supposed to.  So there is more residual sugar in the batch (yum, I like sweet wine!!) but this also means there is a little less alcohol content.

Upon tasting the wine , I found the wine had a  very strong raisin flavor.  Now, I am debating on fortifying it, which means tweaking the wine with a liquor.  Should I add rum and make a Rum Raisin wine or Southern comfort?

Some vintners add vodka.  It is so versatile and has so many flavors that using it to fortify wine is handy.  Personally, I do not use vodka to fortify my wine.  Different alcohols can affect everyone differently.  I don’t like the way it affects me and other people that I know.

I have decided to dilute it just a little to help with the overly strong raisin flavor.  Next, I will fortify it with southern comfort.  I add a small amount at a time and stir and taste.

Delicious Wine Tasting

Sometimes, I also have my husband assist me with the tasting process, it can get challenging to work on the taste once your taste buds get accustomed to the wine.

This process is just like going to a wine tasting and trying many different wines.  After the third or fourth tasting, you may fall in love with the wine you’re trying.  Then you buy a bottle and bring the wine home.

When you open it a few weeks later, yuck, what was I thinking?!?  The same thing can happen when you are working on the tasting process.   It all starts to taste great after a few tastes.

The Amazing Final Product

I really enjoy having our wine bottles stored in my wine cellar.  We keep the wine bottles layed down on their side so the corks stay moist and keep the seal.

At one point, we had approximately one hundred bottles in our wine cellar.  I love being able to keep my wine cellar full with a variety of choices but the best part is how I have seen my family and friends enjoy the fruits of my labor!  Yes, I do love the art of Oenology!  I hope theses Oenology tips for beginners will help you with your future winemaking.

Cheers!