Bennington Suburban Vineyard Part 4- Bottling

This weekend we started bottling one of the batches of wine. 

It's still not quite super tasty and needs to sit in the bottle a while longer. But it was time to move it, partially because we had a newer batch of skins that needed to be pressed and moved into a glass carboy, and we're too cheap to buy another one.

We're also too cheap to buy our own bottles, so there's an open call out to anyone who has ANY wine bottles they want to give us. Everyone who donates gets a free bottle of the finished product to take home.

This looks kinda like a weird Christmas tree doesn't it? It's a bottle drying rack. The white thing on the top will squirt a sulfer sanitizing solution deep into the bottles to clean them out, then you hang them to dry. My question is, why don't they make these for baby bottles?

By the way, this is after these bottles soaked in the tub and had all of their labels peeled off.  Since our friend who works at St. Elmo's had given us some, I think Jeremy was quietly moaning about some of the awesomely expensive bottles and wishing he had emptied them himself.

So from the glass carboy, we have a tube with a squirty thing on the end that cuts off when you have the right amount of liquid per bottle. Think about the fast food soda machines that know just when to stop.

The corks have to be mailable to go in the bottle, so we soaked them in a bath for a while just like the bottles. Basically everyone gets a soak in the tub during this process.

 Fill it up

Then place it under the corker and POP! it goes straight down in. Done. Now wait for it to mature, have your graphically talented friend make you some special wine labels and you're good to go.

This one was one we made from the store bought juice, but while Jeremy was at it we sampled some of the juice from our own garden grapes. I've got to say it was pretty darn GOOD. I think it will be so cool if our grapes actually make a bonafied good-tasting wine, especially since we've been tending to them for 4 years waiting for a bumper crop.

From plant start to delicious wine, the circle of life.