Winemaking 101: Chapter 3

After a week of our house smelling like yeast, we acquired a 5-gallon carboy and auto-siphon to transfer the wine for secondary fermentation.  Taking the cover off the top of the bucket revealed something that looked like sediment on top of the wine.

First things first, you have to pull the bag of fruit out and try to squeeze out as much of the liquid as possible.

This was something we were not prepared for and I almost wished we were doing it in the garage.  As my husband squeezed and rung it out, we got some sprays of juice on the cupboards, floor, and ourselves!  (Yes, those gloves look serious and they are serious gloves, but he works in the medical field, so it's what we had to keep both his hands clean and the wine from being contaminated by his hands.) Once that was done, we decided to let the sediment settle again before siphoning.

Just after this, we put the bucket on a chair.

Such a pretty color!

The auto-siphon is a beautiful thing and not much more expensive than a regular siphon that you have to suck on to get started.  Not only is it easier because it's just a pump, but it keeps things as sterile as possible.  As we were transferring the wine, we both couldn't stop marveling at what a nice color it had.  They say to take as much of the liquid as possible, even if it means you're taking sediment with it.

More Fox Spring water, of course.

As you can see, the next step is to fill the rest of the carboy with water because we took out a large bag of fruit, so this is how to get five gallons of wine.  Finally, you have to close it with an airlock, which gets filled with water, so that the wine stays in an anaerobic environment during secondary fermentation, allowing air to escape but not enter.  We then moved it down into the basement and put the warming belt on it.  It will stay there for 4-6 weeks.  

Of course, we couldn't do this without sampling a little of the product so far.  We poured two glasses: one straight from the siphon and one from the drippings of the bag of fermented fruit.

From the siphon.

From the fermentation bag.

The glass on the left tasted more like very sweet rotten fruit than wine.  The glass on the right tasted much, much less like rotten fruit, but it still definitely has a long way to go!  We're looking forward to tasting the next stage in about a month, though it will still have aging to do after that, too.