Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Monday, August 1, 2011

!!!Vino!!!

Yesterday we bottled 5 gallons each of Mango Mint Chenin Blanc and a Peach Chardonnay!!!  We used a filter for the first time which proved to be more difficult than we thought it would be but was well worth it!!!  The difference in the filtered wine vs. the unfiltered wine is apparent immediately.  I should have taken a picture of the difference but not sure if the camera would have been able to catch it anyways.
 This is me with our bottle tree.  We have to soak, de-label, sanitize, and dry all of the bottles that we're going to use.  This is the most we've ever had on our tree since we're bottling 2 batches at once.

Bottles are now dried and sanitized and I'm splitting up the bottles so we know which ones are for each batch of wine... don't want to have too many big or regular sized bottles per batch... trying to keep it pretty even.
 Me drinking wine while we're getting ready to bottle.  I think Michael was fighting with the filter while I was playing around... lol
Michael making sure everything with the filter is working correctly so that our vino turns out beautiful!!!

Bottling and Corking!!!!  I fill the sanitized bottles with Vino and Michael corks the bottles with NEW sanitized corks!!! The floor is the best place to do this because the carboy filled with Vino has to be up higher than the bottle so that it will siphon easily.  (Of course we clean and sanitize EVERYTHING before we do this)
 This is the day's Vino all together.  In this picture is the Mango Mint Chenin Blanc, Peach Cardonnay (Both bottled this day), a few bottles of Blueberry Pinot Nior that we bottled last month, and a couple big bottles of Jarlsberg Riesling that we bottled a few months ago. 

:)