Hi, I’m Chris Pearmund here at the Winery La Grange in Haymarket, Virginia and today we’re talking about wine making, commercial wine making, and home winemaking, how they relate to each other. And what we’re going to talk about in this clip is how to bottle your wine now that we’ve made it. There’s a couple of different elements you want to be aware of before you bottle your wine and we go through a quick simple bottling for the home winemaker as well.

One thing that’s important is the potassium metabisulfite or free sulfur in wine. Free sulfur is on the back label of wine in this country called sulfite is antioxidant. This helps to protect the wine from oxygen, spoilage as well as any microbial spoilage that can occur in a wine. We normally measure wine at about 30 parts per million, very, very spans small amount and nothing to be of harm for. It’s used in many different products in our food industries.

To take a sample, one uses a wine thief. Not like my brother the wine thief but this little piece of glass. We’re going into your wine container and basically act like a straw to where you can take the wine out and it will hold until you release your finger and you’re able to have your wine sample. Of course, the most important part of testing wine is the wine itself. Does it smell right, does it taste right?

If you want to change the wine, you can change it before it goes into the bottle. You can't change much after it goes into the bottle and what we’re going to do is test the wine for free SO2 or free sulfur but rather than using this red wine that we’ve been working on, I'm going to use a white wine. It’s a lot easier to work with, to show you how this works. The product we’re going to use is from CHEMetrics, it’s Titrets which will measure many different things and this particular one will measure free SO2.

Basically, this is the vacuum with a chemical agent. We’ll break off a little piece of glass tube. Bring in a small amount of liquid. The blue will show that the chemical reaction is working.

We’re going to take in more liquid until the blue disappears and becomes clear. That will be your time to stop so that the vacuuming or bringing in liquid will bring a small amount of liquid until it becomes clear. Now, this liquid is clear, the stratifications to let us know that this wine is at three parts per million, free SO2, a very safe place for wine and ready to bottle. Now, that you spent time and money for the last six months making your wine, now it’s time to bottle it.

Bottling wine is very simple. You want to take clean glass. You want to make sure it’s been rinse well on the inside. Any cardboard, dust or any particular matter is not into there. The wine has been filtered. You check your free SO2 and you’re ready to bottle. A simple siphon tube as many of the different bottling opportunities out there if you want to spend some extra money at this process. But I want it to show you the simple step first.

When you do put a cork into a bottle of wine, you want to make sure that there is room for you cork and there’s some room for air space as well. In this type of corker, you’re going to be compression the cork, enforcing the cork into the bottle. There will be a lot of compression of air here, so you don’t want to lay the bottle down and you do want to leave air space to absorb that compression of air here.

So as we place the bottle into the corker, place to adjust, your cork in to adjust. You compress this and you slide the cork into the bottle, just as easy as that. You want to make your cork level, have a little air space and now you can let it wait for a little while. You like to keep your bottle at an angle either side ways or upside down to keep the cork moist but why don’t you wait a day until that happens to make sure that any compression of gas here can escape.

Well, now that we work so hard in making some wine, time for the most important bit to appreciate all the love and effort and passion and to making what I think is the world’s greatest products. Cheers!