Go to content Go to navigation Go to search

27 August 2007

[Epi 13] TintoTV - eventful 2nd racking: ABV, auto-siphon, more

Add to del.icio.us! – Digg this! – Twit this! – Subscribe Subscribe


Two months we’ve aged our strawberry wine “sur lie” (“on the lees”) and, after oaking for about 10 days, it is time to rack off the lees and sediment and into another carboy. We perform some extra important steps and learn a bit about our strawberry wine! This fun episode includes, among other things:

Ok, about percentage alcohol by volume: we need two things to help us here, a hydrometer and a chart (I’ll show you which chart in a moment). This is the simple procedure: 1) take the specific gravity (“SG”) reading prior to fermentation, this hints at the potential alcohol content when the must is fermented to dryness. 2) When fermentation has completed, take another SG reading. Each SG reading is associated with a potential alcohol percentage, usually this chart is comes with your hydrometer! The charts can appear to be something similar to this: http://www.finevinewines.com/brix_table.htm (your chart might vary with your calibrated hydrometer). This is where step 3 comes in: 3) Take the potential alcohol associated with your starting SG and subtract the potential alcohol tied with your ending SG, that’s your alcohol by volume percentage!

For us, we started with a SG of 1.076 on this strawberry batch, and this corresponds to about 10.0% potential alcohol. Our ending SG was about 0.990, which corresponds to -1.3%. We do the subtraction:
10.0 – (-1.3) = 10.0 + 1.3 = 11.3 alc. by vol. for our strawberry wine!

In case you’re interested, we saw another quick formula for calculating a ABV estimate:
(startSG – endSG) / 7.36
We don’t know the background on the formula but we thought we’d share in case you were interested. Just to re-emphasize, these methods should give you very reasonable ballparks of your alcohol by volume content; you’d need very expensive equipment to be able to discover this precisely.

Next, you’ve seen us struggle with our racking! Starting the siphon can be difficult! Commenters, you had tips and we listened!!! First, the auto-siphon cane is an excellent investment for a home winemaker. With just a few pumps, a siphon is easily started and you can concentrate on not mixing up the lees! Also, another commenter recommended shortening our tubing, so we snipped about 18” of the tube, and as seen on the episode, combined with the auto-siphon, we had a very easy, smooth, and clean racking! Thanks for the tips, commenters!

The process of degassing can be very tricky for homemade wine. It is important to remove the trapped carbon dioxide, otherwise we’ll have a carbonated/fizzy wine that will have trouble clearing. With longer-term bulk aging, this CO2 should work itself out, but there are many ways to help extract the CO2. Typical procedures involve heavy stirring of the wine. Some tools exist to attach to power drills so that you can better stir the carbon dioxide out of the wine, and we will certainly do this with our bigger batches, but with your 1-gallon batches, with the extra head-space after racking, why not simply pick it up and give it a very rough shake!!!?!?!?!? We found this to be a very quick and effective way to help aid the degassing of our wine!

The last thing we focused on involved Winexpert White Grape Concentrate (fyi, Winexpert Red Grape Concentrate also exists). These concentrates are very thick honey-like concentrates that are used to add body, flavor, aroma, and sweetness to your wine; they are not meant to be a vital part of your must. For our strawberry wine, we thought we’d add some sweetness to the wine and some extra mouth feel by pouring about 100mL of the concentrate into the wine! We hope we didn’t over-do it, and we should have probably tasted before adding, but Tinto TV is all about experimentation! Please note that we did add potassium sorbate before adding the concentrate in order to prevent renewed fermentation (since the concentrate has a lot of sugar)!

Quick disclaimer: we are not affiliated with Fine Vine Wines – The Winemaker’s Toystore, we have bought much of our equipment from them and we find their site very useful, so that is why we link to them here.

One more notice about our show! As we mentioned in the episode, Stephany and I love making wine together and love creating the show to share with others; we’ve been doing our best to publish episodes weekly as a predictable schedule for updates! However, since winemaking does require a lot of patience and we want to provide you with valuable content, we are going to shift the show to a biweekly schedule. We have already planned out a great set of shows coming up and we will be starting new batches that we will certainly share with the show. We welcome and invite your photos and your video clips, we’d love to share on the show what other viewers are doing. If you have any suggestions for content or anything else you’d prefer to see, please COMMENT or email us, we love hearing from you!

Thanks for visiting!!!

Comments

  1. We enjoyed your latest show & meeting you at the bottling. Nico & Stephany, we are having a Wine gathering Thursday evening, you are invited to attend. If you are interested send me a note and I give you the details.


    — Steven E Baumgartner    Aug 27    #

  2. Hey Nico have you put in the finning agent yet? Now We understand why you don’t blend the fruit before you start the fermentation. We can’t wait to try the finished product with you guys. Maybe ours will be ready by then and we can have a wine tasting party.
    P.S. Stephy, we love the new look.


    — Sergio & Saris    Aug 27    #

  3. I like the auto-siphon and I might even buy one myself. A friend of mine made strawberry wine and the color is very similar to your wine. It tasted great. Did you take a specific gravity reading after you added the grape syrup? I wonder if it went up. Keep up the great job.


    — Bob    Aug 31    #

  4. It is great to see you guys be daring and introduce new products to the wine-making process and it’s great to see the canicas back in the show!


    — Juan Carlos    Oct 3    #

Entire Tinto TV archive