Thread: Homemade Country Wine Production

This time all my wine is already a year old. I bulk aged it as I understood it would age more gracefully than in the bottle. It's very drinkable now and smooth too. I have so much to bottle and this is a summer, hot weather wine, it will drink chilled or over ice, flexible.

I see home wine makers stick a cork in just about anything. When viewing the finished project nothing matches, size, shape, or color. Heaven Forbid some even cork a screw top bottle. Screw Top Bottles do not have the reinforced glass neck for holding the cork compressed. Injuries happen all the time using a hand corker on a screw top. Like Crappie fishing I feel all the little steps matter towards the success of the day's work. Here is what I go through annually to match bottles with wines, corks, etc. I started this early this morning as the T-Time for pulling the Pursuit was 11am. Now I'm getting back on it but thought all of you would get a chuckle out of the process.



In this first picture very early on the Cab bottles (Cabernet)on the right are more cylindrical than the Pino Noir bottles to the left. I like to bottle the Satsuma Wine in a green Cab bottle. Well I need 30 of those. All the bottles get drug out at one time to sort.



The table is not big enough for the bottles I have on hand or just what I need. This picture is of overflow cases of empty wine bottles.



Another shot after a hour or so you can see boxes on the left. Some I'm filling with matching bottles some are empty. Good boxes are hard to get so I keep all mine in good shape.



Another hour in and I'm working to match up what I can within a small space to work. In a lot of these are few that match so I also group by shape, color, bottle neck size (some are as small as 28-29mm up to 36-38mm. The neck diameter matters when buying the shrink caps that are added last.

It seems like a lot of work but keeping busy has always been my way. After this mornings order of supplies for the 235 bottles of wine I made in the 2022/2023 fermenting season I'm going to be about $350 all in. That's a little less than $1.50 a finished bottle. Not bad.

Very economical!

Way too organized for me. You work too hard. You might want to slow down a little and have a drink of wine. You know where to get any wine? Maybe someone on the site can hook you up.

Originally Posted by Slab

Way too organized for me. You work too hard. You might want to slow down a little and have a drink of wine. You know where to get any wine? Maybe someone on the site can hook you up.

Had a real big productive day today. Here is a tease of the progress.



This is Owari Satsuma Wine, the next up for filtering, stabilizing, preserving, backsweetening, and bottling.

I have a few posts for this am. So Labels are such a pain to remove I don't put labels on my wine bottles. I buy these Heat Shrink seals online from closeout locations keeping my costs down. Using different colors for different wines the bottles get color-coded before I add a Gold Leaf looking label around the shrink with the wine's name written in Sharpie. By labeling the wine in this manner when the wine bottle is emptied I can just cut the shrink seal off with a pocket knife, clean & sanitize the bottle, and re-fill with wine.



I put all the seals on the bottles first setting them up on my right, as I hold the Heat gun in my left hand.



As I Seal a bottle I move it to the left out of the way.



Once all the bottles in the batch are sealed they are ready for the storage racks.