Australian Chardonnay: A little soon after bottling to taste, but I couldn’t help myself.  Still too young, but nice. Buttery nose, lots of heavy oak in the attack and flavors fall a little short after that. Quite crisp. Lingering finish. Drinkable now, but will be very nice in a few months. Probably not giftable at this point.

Also popped a bottle of Chamblaise, from the first set.  A very nice drinking wine. Definitely changed a lot over time, a lot more vegetal especially in the nose. Very crisp and clean. Worth the work, this one gave me trouble both bottlings this year.

Cab merlot tasting: 6 month tasting (close enough). Very fruity nose, smells and tastes very young still. Flavors rounding out but still not quite balanced, but falling into place. Hopefully will mellow out in a few more months. Slightly sour. No soapiness, no fizz. Definitely improving with age.

Bourgeron Rouge: 6 week tasting! Still very young, but shaping up nicely. Sourness is tamed but still present. Tastes not unlike a Beaujolais Nouveau. Sour cherry in the nose with a little soapiness. Bright fruity flavors of cherry and plums, maybe a little overripe strawberry. A little spice.

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 wine into another clean carboy before starting to bottle, so that I would not have to worry about getting solids into my last bottles.  That would NOT make a nice gift, I’m sure.

First, I gathered everything together that I might need.  Bottles, bottle jet for rinsing bottles, bottle tree for draining bottles.  Corks, corker.  Auto-siphon and automatic bottle filler.  The wine was racked into the clean carboy, then set up on the counter.  The bottles were new, but I rinsed them out with easy clean solution anyway, just to be sure.  To rinse, I put easy clean solution in the bottle jet, then the bottle gets pumped on the phallus until water squirts up into it.  Depending on your state of mind, it’s either very exciting or very disturbing.  Either way, I usually do about 3 squirts of solution per bottle, then the bottle goes on the draining tree.  The bottles don’t need to be completely dry, and the easy clean doesn’t need to be rinsed out of the bottles.  I prepped the corks by putting them in dilute easy clean solution just before we started, but I wasn’t sure it was the best thing to do.  There were several aspects of the bottling process that I didn’t really have instructions for, so I just kind of started.

I had read that the bottles shouldn’t sit open for very long, so my hubby was put on corking duty.  He also helped me start the siphon into the bottler, and then we were off!  Oh, what a mess – red wine started spraying out of every crack of the bottler, so we clipped off the siphon and I actually read the instructions for using it.  I adjusted the screw at the top, and it eventually stopped spraying at least.  As soon as the bottle reached the bottom of the bottler, the wine flow stopped.  I then had to *remember* to push the button on the autobottler to actually stop the flow of wine when I removed the bottler to move it to another bottle.  I think I only lost about one bottle’s worth of wine on the floor and cabinets (and me, actually) before I caught on.  We also quickly realized that paper towels are an important requirement for the bottling process.  I also got out some plastic boxes to put the wine bottles in as they were filled, since the bottler did drip a little bit every time I switched bottles.

We eventually finished, and actually ended up with 30 bottles.  The last bottle wasn’t quite full, so we consumed this bottle the same day. It had a slightly weird aftertaste with first taste, but that went away quickly. There was a nice nose of berries, good tannins — definitely still young with bold fruit flavors. Really not bad for a first wine and first taste without any bottle aging!

The final touches were to put on the labels, including the front label and a sticker on the back with the bottling date, and shrink caps.  This was a little challenging, I used steam from my tea kettle, which resulted in some pretty wrinkled caps.  But, overall, they looked pretty!

The army of wine is ready to head to the cellar – in 3 days anyway.  The wine is left upright for at least 3 days to let the corks kind of get comfy and settled, otherwise they might leak or even pop out.  Or so I read.

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 agents.  All that happens at this stage is to put the carboy up on the counter and rack into a fresh carboy, without shaking or stirring up the junk at the bottom and trying to avoid transferring most of the stuff at the bottom (called fine lees at this point) to the clean carboy.  If a little gets transferred, it’s not horrible because the wine will sit for another 2 weeks, giving any transferred stuff time to settle back to the bottom again.  Which means, more waiting!

At least while I’m waiting I have my second kit to start.  Chamblaise got dumped into the bucket today!

At this stage several things happen.  The juice is completely fermented to wine now, and the final SG is generally <1.  My SG was at 0.992, giving me a final alcohol by volume of 13.1% — not bad.  After confirming that the wine is fermented to dryness, a couple of things are added to the wine:  metabisulfate and sorbate are dissolved in 1/2 cup water, I use the filtered water from the fridge and warm it a little in the microwave so the powders will dissolve.  This is then added to the wine and you are supposed to stir “vigorously” for 2 minutes.  I only had my big spoon at this point, but had recently read about a drill-driven stirrer.  After stirring as fast as I could for 2 minutes, I went and ordered one – 2 minutes is a long time to stir by hand!

And the stirring wasn’t over yet!  Next the packet of clarifier – chitosan in this kit – was poured in, followed by ANOTHER 2 minutes of stirring.  Oi!  But, that was all of the stirring finally.  Now the wine needs to be topped up so that the wine is a the level of the carboy neck, so there is minimal contact with air.  The instructions say to use cool water or reserved wine if available.  I didn’t have any reserved, and it did not occur to me until later that I could use a commercial finished wine, so I added about a cup of water to top.

More waiting ……