Clearing & Bottling Country Wine (Elderberry Wine part 2)

in a recent video we showed how we make Elderberry wine How We Gather the berries how we prepare a must and get them fermenting a lot of people wanted to know what the rest of the process looks like which is common to most country wines but it covers how to clear the wine how to filter the wine how to bottle the wine so that's what we're doing today [Music] hello welcome to English country life Welcome to the kitchen my name's she and together with my lovely wife Fiona we run a small holding here in rural Lincolnshire I did a video recently showing How We Gather and start to ferment elderly one a lot of people wanted to see the rest of the process which is common to most country wines so our Elderberry wine has finished fermenting and what we're going to do today is remove it from the beginnings of sediment then we're going to precipitate out any more suspended sediment in the wine then we're going to filter it to give it a Polish and then we're going to bottle it so let's get going [Music] once fermentation is complete we've got to get the wine off the sediment the sediment that forms is things like spent yeast it's plant material it's all of that sort of stuff and that's sits at the bottom of the Demi jump and the art is to draw off the wine without disturbing that sediment and to do that we're going to use a wine siphon cheap bit of Kit let me show you how that works and we'll draw our finished fermenting wine off the sediment and then we'll start getting it really clear this is a wine siphon it's a simple thing you can get away with just a piece of rubber tubing but these help first thing to know is it's got a solid pipe that's slightly deeper than a damage on it's also got a bum in the bottom and what that means is that liquid has to go into that cup to be siphoned up it can't come in straight through the bottom so you don't draw up any sediment the other thing that's worth noting is it's got a tap on the other end so you can draw up some liquid close the tap and then transfer it by opening the tap when you adjust over the next damage on so this is how we tend to use it take out the airlock and then you're gonna go really steady just lower the siphon into the wine till near but not quite touching the bottom of the wine because you don't want to stir up all that sediment and when you've got it there suck some wine into the tube and when it's in the tube close the pipe move the tube down into a clean sterile empty damage on and open the tube again and what you'll notice then is that gravity just runs that wine down into the bottom Demi jump and it's just flowing down that pipe creating a vacuum sucking more wine after itself that's how a siphon works and once you've done that you'll notice a couple of things one is you've lost a bit of liquid because as all that sediment is removed the level of the liquid Falls and there's always a little bit of loss that you can't quite siphon up but what you're left with now doesn't have any danger of stirring up the sediment when you move on to the next step [Music] once you've got the wine off the initial sediment they're still suspended particles in it and we need to get them out and there's pretty much three approaches to getting them out time works really well just leave it put it back in a damage on with an airlock every couple of months have a look if you've got a good layer of sediment with the stuff slowly settling out rack it off again siphon it off again into a different clean damage on put the airlock back in keep making sure there's plenty of liquid in that airlock and over time the particles will settle out naturally but it can take quite a long time for that to happen the second approach is you can add various things parts of egg for example to the wine and that will cause some of those suspended particles to Clump together more quickly and settle out and if you'd like a video on that let me know in the comments and I'll make a video showing you various different techniques you can use to settle out the particles the third thing you can do is use commercial findings which normally come in the form of two liquids either in sachets or in bottles and those liquids work together to settle out the suspended particles in that form the normal combination of liquids is the first one is called Kiesel salt it's also known as colloidal silica and it attracts various charged particles to itself and it causes them to Clump up into bigger and bigger lumps those lumps then settle out much more quickly than they would do otherwise the second liquid is one called chitosan and word of warning to any vegans Sugar Sand is made from the exoskeletons of various creatures and it's not vegan friendly but that also attracts charge particles to it which get bigger Clump up and settle out Y2 liquids one attracts positively charged particles one attracts negatively charged particles and the combination of the two of them working together will settle out all your particles normally in my experience in less than a week usually three or four days is quite sufficient you put in the Kiesel soil give it a swirl leave it for half an hour then put in the required amount of the chitosan give it as well put the airlock in leave it for a few days and normally you get a really good fast settling out of any suspended particles using findings is fine so long as you follow the process take the airlock out measure the required amount of the first liquid put it into the damage on and then give it a gentle stir but make sure it's well mixed with something like a meat skewer that will reach to the bottom of the damage on the most important part then is then put the airlock back in and wait at least 30 minutes after 30 minutes repeat the process with the other liquid the first liquid will attract one type of charged particles and you want it to bond with and Clump with those particles before you add the second liquid otherwise the queso salt and the chitter sand will work against each other rather than one settling out one type of particle and the other settling out the other type of particle they work well if you follow the process [Music] findings or indeed time will get most of the big stuff out of your wine get those particulates gone and the wine looks so much better there is an optional stage that we can go to beyond that and it uses this is a wine filter and how it works is we take a really thick pad of papery material like the world's thickest lump of blotting paper in effect and before we use it we run water through that pad inside the wine filter and what that does is it swells all the fibers of that pad up so they bind really tightly together and they make a fantastically fine filter the pad is supported inside the Line Filter buy a mesh and on top of that buy a screw so the whole lot holds tightly together and once we've done that we can run our wine through the filter and what will happen is the wine goes in the top of the filter then passes through the filter pad and any fine particulars can't get through that pad and they will just sit on the top of the pad and we'll throw them away at the end of the wine making process with the used pad the pads are a one-time used item so let's filter our wine get rid of any fine particulates and then we can move on to bottling the filtering process is very simple but there are a few little tricks I've learned over the years and one of them is to prop the Demi John up so that it's on a slight angle and that prevents you getting a thin layer stuck at the bottom of the damage on and what I then did take out the airlock and I'll take the rubber tube that comes with the filter and I'll poke it down to the deepest part of the damage up so that all the liquid runs to the tube then I suck up some liquid and the little pinch valve on the end of that tube basically like a tap that you can seal the tube with liquid inside it I can take that down to the filter which is sat on a clean sterilized empty damage on put it onto the little nozzle that allows it on and then undo the pinch valve and it takes a few seconds so don't panic but eventually the wine will start to run through that filter it's not quick because it's a very thick filter but it will give you a beautiful polished finish it's very hard to show it to you in a video but it really does come up sort of almost Ruby bright you can't walk away you do need to keep an eye on what's going on particularly in the top Demi jumpers what I find again is even though it's on an angle as you get down to the last half a cup full or so you really want to tilt that damage on to make sure that you suck up the very last remnant of the wine or you lose wine [Music] we're on the last lap now we've got to get our wine into the bottles and cork the bottles how do we do that I have often been in the habit with country wines I just pouring them into the bottles using a funnel and the wine making snobs honestly it gives them the vapors they start clutching their pearls and going oh no it'll ruin the flavor profile if you oxygenate the wine well maybe it will I've been making wine for over 40 years it doesn't seem to hurt any of the wine I've made but it can't hurt to pay attention to other people so you can use your wine siphon run the wine down into the bottles run it down the side of the bottles it mixes with as little air as possible and that way certainly is definitely not going to make the wine any worse so that's how we'll do it today then we've got to Cork the wine how do we do that well we do it with a caulking gun twin lever gun a bit of cork in the throat of the gun sit the neck on the neck of a bottle and then pull down on the levers and that compresses the cork as it goes through the neck of the caulking gun pushes it into the neck of the wine bottle where it expands again and forms an airtight seal so that's how we're going to Cork our wine [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thing we like to do is put a shrink cap so-called on this is a shrink cap they're simple little things they're a bit like the heat shrink used in electrical systems they shrink when you put heat on them and what you do is you take your wine bottle you put a shrink cap on the top of the wine bottle and then you heat the shrink cap I use a heat gun A lot of the time but it works equally well if you plunge the bottle and the cap into boiling water just put some heat around it and it will shrink on seal over the Cork and give a lovely professional appearance then you need to label your wine now you've got a lot of choices there you could print something out on your computer and put it on with sellotape or even print a label and put it on one thing I would recommend whether you hand write your labels whether you use stickers or plain paper is cover them in sellotape because if you lay your wine down for a few years those kind of prints even Biro writing can fade there's nothing more frustrating than mystery wine so cover those things over with some sort of plastic just to keep them sealed what I use these days are these these are oil-based pens and you can write on your line and I think it gives a nice kind of boutiquey look to the wine it also lasts really well just be careful not to get the chalk based pens because they rub off really easily well that is how we clear filter bottle Cork and Seal our Elderberry wine and the principles as we said at the beginning apply to most country wines I hope we've been able to explain not just what we do but why we do it and to give some alternatives if you've enjoyed today's content can you spare us five seconds give us a thumbs up down below if you'd like to know more about wine making beer making flavored Spirits Meads and Method glands tell us in the comments what you'd like to see and we'll try and make those drinks and video the process and show you how we do it you 'd like to see those videos and everything else we do on self-sufficient living and you haven't subscribed to the channel tap on subscribe down below and hit the Bell next to it it's totally free but then you'll get to hear every time we upload a new video for today thanks for watching your good health come back and see us soon take care [Music]

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 5,771

Keywords: Good Life, Homestead, Elderflower, Elderberry, Wine, Country Wine, Hedgerow wine, Brewing, Fermentation, Elder Flower, Home Brew, Home Made Wine

Id: 4MeiiLZ_cuc

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022