Hi, I’m Chris Pearmund and today we’re here at the Winery La Grange in Haymarket, Virginia to discuss wine making principles, both to the commercial wine producer and the home winemaker. What we’re going to talk about in this segment or clip is about fining and filtration of a wine getting ready for bottling. And some of the aging aspects of wine and oxygen as it relates to small batches of the home winemaking.

Basically, when wine is fermented, a red wine in this example, we have grapes that we talked about earlier. These grapes have fermented from sugared alcohol. As it fermented the small particulates of skin and pulp have incorporated within the juice and the wine and are floating around basically. Over the course of time, these particulates will settle down to the bottom of the container but there still be some very small amounts of pieces of skin, if you will inside this wine. We want to get this ready for filtration. Filtration is used to remove the particulate matter as is fining and if in a red wine, the wine is actually darker when it has been filtered and fined properly without little pieces of particulate that reflect the light out. It actually becomes darker.

For white wine, it becomes nice and clean and clear. There’s a good argument to be said against the fining or filtration of wine because you’re taking out a lot of little flavor specs and flavor profiles of the wine but it’s how commercial wine is made. So basically, what we’re going to do is a few things. You want to either remove the small particulate matter in the wine before it goes into the bottle or you want to stop that particulate from becoming sediment.

In removing the wine, the old fashion way is using egg whites. You would take some egg whites. Add some water, put them together. Put in a container this size about half of an egg white. Mix with the same amount of water, mixed it together. Put it in the container, stir it and let it settle for a couple of days. This will basically coagulate a lot of the pieces of particulate and they will then settle out. There are different fining agents to remove different elements of wine.

If you have a wine that has high elements of protein, there are things to remove protein levels. There are ways to cold settle or to cold stabilize a wine. The commercial wine making aspects are important here but not for the home winemaker. They’re not important for the home winemaker because the home winemaker isn’t going to have this wine sitting on a store shelf for six months at a time, being travel in around in a truck or trailer and going through extremes of temperature.

The commercial aspects are really to preserve wine from changing its integrity over the course of time. So back to the home wine making, we’re going to take this container which will mix up some egg whites. Mixed it in, let it settle for a few days and there’s a small amount of sediment in the bottom.

So, we’re going to take off our vapor lock and we’re going to take the clean wine from the top and leave the small amount of sediment and change this wine into the next container which has been washed. You can take a siphon hose and if you look carefully you can pull the siphon hose down to about this level. If you put your thumb across the top of it, you can actually start siphoning.

When you siphon one, you don’t want to have it splash very much. To minimize splash, take your hose and have it long enough to allow no splashing. If you’re able to put some CO2 gas in or some Argon gas or something to minimize any action uptake. That’s a good thing to, it’s not necessary. In working with the hose, you can find the end of this line. You don’t want to pick up any sediment in the bottom and as the container fills, you can take it tilted to the edge as well. We surely we’ll leave the sediment behind. Be careful. Always clean up after you finish before, during and after.

On our next clip, we’re going to talk about bottling itself and testing the wine prior to bottling. And have it in a glass to make sure it’s some of the quality that you want, thanks.