The rewards and frustrations of home winemaking

Monthly archive: 06 2007

Happy Yeast Make a Happy Home

Happiness – the stir did the trick for the Pinot Gris!  The SG reading was 0.992 today, yay!  Time to rack.  Also, the Chamblaise gets stabilized and cleared today.  The weekends are starting to get busy ….

Really, How Much is Too Much???

Yep, I got a third wine kit.  It’s not my fault, I was browsing for other wine kits and places to get them, and saw this Estate Series Oregon Yamhill County Pinot Gris Wine Making Kit on sale ….  a premium wine kit ….  it needed a home!  But, today I’m wondering if some higher […]

Finally Time to Bottle!

Happily the wine was very clear at the last racking, so I was confident that it was fine to bottle after 2 more weeks.  I had added extra Kmeta (potassium metabisulphite) for long-term aging when it was racked previously.  There was a little layer of goop in the bottom, so I opted to rack the […]

First Racking of Chamblaise

The Chamblaise is at SG 0.996 today, ready to rack out of the primary fermentation bucket and into a carboy for secondary fermentation.  The wine won’t get topped up yet, I’ll leave some space on top so that I can stir in the stabilizing and clearing agents in about 2 weeks.

Racking and Clarification

The wine sits an additional 8 days for the clarifying agents to do their thing and bind to all of the junk floating around in the wine, mainly yeast carcasses at this point (yummy!).  They clump the junk together forming heavy particles that will fall to the bottom of the carboy faster then without the […]