Wine in the Shower » clearing

Stabilizing & Clearing Argentinian trio

gisela — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:27:06 +0000

The Argentinian Trio was a bit full after racking, so I took out about 550 mL before degassing. I’m glad I did, there was a LOT of foam! It was foamy for the first and second set of stirring, then I waited about half an hour an stirred again to try to really degas the wine well. After a while the foam settled down and I topped up the wine, though there was still about 400 mL leftover that I put into some other bottles for later. It smells really great!

Filtering Wine

gisela — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:16:06 +0000

After some research about wine NOT clearing like it’s supposed to, I have come to the conclusion that I will have to filter this wine. I put in my order for a VinBrite gravity filter. Hopefully it will do the trick.

The Key Word is Clearing

gisela — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 10:12:03 +0000

I’m a bit annoyed at the chamblaise, there’s all sorts of *stuff* stuck to the side of the carboy, and it’s getting carried over when I rack the wine. It sat long enough, I’ll look into problems with clearing and try to figure out what to do about it. No bottling today!

Stabilizing and Clearing

gisela — Sat, 26 May 2007 16:17:44 +0000

Luckily I had not been told yet to read and follow the directions exactly, and so I waited more than the 10 days indicated in the instructions to do the next step: stabilizing and clearing. I didn’t want to cut the time short, and I really only had time to deal with the wine on the weekend, so I waited 2 weeks before tackling the next step. It turns out it’s OK, there is some flexibility to winemaking.

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 ……