How to Prepare Wine for Bottles

Making and bottling wine are very straightforward processes. And you don't need to have an entire vineyard of grapes to make a decent bottle of wine. Wine-making stores offer kits that provide potential winemakers with all the ingredients they'll need. These kits contain not only the chemicals to produce wine, but also the juice that gives the wine its flavor. When you're planning to make wine, use food-grade containers that have been properly cleaned and sanitized.

Instructions

• 1

  Sanitize the 6-gallon container you'll be using as your primary fermenter. Most wine kits come with a packet of sulfite. Mix the sulfite into four liters of water and swish it around the inside of the container. This mix can be used more than once, so dump it out into a lidded container until it's needed again.

• 2

  Mix the wine according to the kit's instructions. Add enough water to the container so that there are five gallons of liquid. Sprinkle it with yeast and cover it loosely with a lid. Let this mixture sit for a week.

• 3

  Test the specific gravity of your wine mixture (called must) around day six with the hydrometer. Once the hydrometer reaches 1.010, begin siphoning the must from the primary to the secondary fermenter (carboy). Place the primary fermenter on a table and the carboy on the ground. Insert the siphon hose all the way to the bottom of the primary fermenter. Suck on the hose until must begins to fill it. Place it into the carboy and let gravity do the rest.

• 4

  Cap the carboy with the bung and airlock to prevent air from getting into the mixture and destroying the fermentation process. Let the filled carboy sit for a week.

• 5

  Transfer the wine back into the primary fermenter, Clean the sediment out of the carboy. Mix the remaining ingredients into the wine and stir the mixture vigorously. Rinse and sanitize the carboy and transfer the wine back into it. Mix the isinglass solution that comes with the kit and add it into the carboy. This solution will help the wine to clear up and should be left for at least two weeks.

• 6

  Clean and sanitize the wine bottles with the sulfite mixture. Place the carboy on a table and siphon 750 milliliters of wine into a measuring cup. Pour this into a bottle to see how much it fills. Fill the remaining bottles with the same amount of wine. Cork each bottle using a hand corker.