We are finally to the taste testing part! After watching something for close to 20 days, I get nervous wanting to make sure it’s not all been a waste. Especially if your fermenting bubbles slow down toward the end like mine have.
Week three is the final “adding” step to your wine mixture. After racking the wine with a siphon into a clean fermenter, we will add another pint of water and the final sugar mixture. Let’s all be thankful that sugar is so cheap, because between wine and jam, it goes quick around here!
We were dead tired and just had to get the wine racked before bed, so no pictures of that process, but the wonderful FerMonsters that I mentioned last week certainly did their job! The sediment stayed in the bottom of the container and the pour spouts made the process much less traumatic than simply using a siphon. If you don’t have a fermenter with a spigot, the siphon can be started by sucking the end of your tubing, but in addition to the germs added to the wine, the two seconds it takes to get the siphon into the ferment jug are REALLY stressful.
Once all the good juice is taken from the top of the fermenter, there will always be some juice waste around the sediment that is really tempting to try and recover. My advice, sacrifice some juice to make sure you don’t take more sediment into the new fermenter than you absolutely have to. Otherwise, you have to rack again and again and again. Or have cloudy wine (guilty).
Incidentally, we composted the main ferment batch and by the smell of the now fermenting compost bin, the fruit flies are having a grand time. The sediment however went down the drain.
So. Final recipe instructions:
After 10 Days
1. Siphon the wine to a container. Sterilize the fermenter, then return the wine.
2. Boil the remaining 1/3 sugar in the last pint of water, allow to cool before adding to the wine.
3. Plug the fermenter with a breathable valve and leave until the wine has stopped fermenting. The wine will stop bubbling when fermentation has stopped.
After Fermentation
1. Siphon the wine as before.
2. Sterilize wine bottles and add a funnel.
3. Pour the wine into the bottles, filling each bottle to the neck, and cork. For corking, we use a manual corker from amazon that has worked really well. However, I will say I am certainly not man enough to use it, so that step definitely falls to the husband!
Again, great thanks to https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Blackberry-Wine for getting me a lot of the way to the recipe I currently use. Taste testing this week went well, and we will likely rack again later in the week and bottle by the weekend. Remember, if you bottle before fermentation is complete, you may have some unplanned explosions!
Stay tuned for the bottling and taste testing process! Promises for pictures by then!
Sourwood Hill 