Category: Winemaking 2018

I think I can safely say that the wine is fermenting well!

I thought that fermenting at 15°C would give a long, slow fermentation recommended to preserve the subtle fruity flavours of white wine. However after less than 2 weeks fermentation is complete.  I don’t think this is a problem but I will try fermenting a few degrees cooler next time to slow things down a little.

I measured the specific gravity every 2 days and plotted the following graph:

As you can see, after 2 days the fermentation really gets going, and is more or less finished after 8 days.  It tastes pretty good, but is definitely on the tart side!

I’ll leave it for another couple of weeks now for the yeast to settle out and then transfer to another container for clarifying and ageing.

This evening I decided it was time to rack the wine off the yeast sediment into a 23 litre demijohn.  I was planning on leaving it longer but it was settling well and I wanted to get it out of the plastic bucket. Partly because they are not the best containers to store wine in long term, but also because I need the bucket for my next batch of beer!

Getting it off the sediment reduces the risk of off flavours from the wine sitting on dead yeast cells. Transferring it to a slightly smaller container also means it can be filled to the brim, keeping headspace to a minimum and therefore reducing the chance of oxidation.

It will sit for a few months now to clear.

The wine has been settling now for about 5 months, and having had a cold spell at the beginning of February, also went through a cold conditioning phase.  Ideally the wine should be allowed to cool to somewhere just above freezing point for a week or so to allow tartrate crystals to precipitate out of the wine. This makes it less likely to happen when the finished wine is put in the fridge before drinking.

My plan is to bottle after six months of settling, which means end of March. The biggest problem is that I need 30 empty champagne bottles. They need to be either true Champagne bottles or bottles which have contained wine made using the Champagne method. These bottles are made from thicker glass than sparkling wines produced using other methods such as prosecco, as they need to cope with secondary fermentation in the bottle which can lead to bottle pressures of up to 100 PSI.

I already had about 12 bottles but needed to find another 18.  So I Googled ‘Cambridge Champagne’ and discovered Cambridgeshire Wine School which holds regular tasting sessions and runs various courses on all things wine related.  I emailed the guy in charge, Mark, who was very quick to respond, and I met up with him after one of his sparkling wine tasting nights.  I managed to pick up another 15 bottles!

So now I’m only 3 bottles short.  I either need to drink 3 bottles of Champagne between now and the end of March or find another source…

The wine has been settling now for 6 months so it’s time to bottle.  I managed to get a few more bottles which takes me up to the 30 that I will need. They have all been washed and soaked to remove the labels:

The first stage of bottling begins 2-3 days before, and involves creating a ‘liqueur de tirage’ which is a mixture of water, wine, sugar and yeast. This is left to ferment at 20°C until the yeast is at its peak of activity at which point it is mixed into the main bulk of wine with some more sugar and then bottled.  It is this yeast and sugar addition that ferments in the bottle, creating the fizz.

I created the liqueur de tirage using a spreadsheet I created which works out the correct quantities based on how much wine you have to bottle:

The mixture was then put into a demijohn with an airlock and left for the yeast to work its magic:

After 3 days at 20°C, the liqueur de tirage was ready to be added to the rest of the wine along with some more sugar. It had only got down to a specific gravity of 1.048, but this if fine, it just meant having to put a little less sugar in for the final addition.

Here are the figures from the spreadsheet showing that the final addition of sugar required was 398g.

Before adding the sugar and liqueur I racked the wine off the sediment, then stirred in the sugar and liqueur. It’s really important to make sure the sugar is fully dissolved and the wine is well stirred, otherwise you could end up with some bottles with not enough fizz and others that risk explosion which would not be fun.

After filling each bottle, they were sealed with a bidule, a small plastic hollow plug in which the yeast collects during the riddling stage, and a crown cap on top of the bidule.

My original calculations were spot on and I ended up with 30 bottles, which are now lying on their sides in the cellar, the best place to keep them at a constant 12°C for secondary fermentation. Ideally they will sit here for 18 months, but I will take a few bottles out in 6 months time to have some ready for Christmas and leave the rest for the following year.

My plan was to have some bottles of 2018 bubbly ready for Christmas.  Two months ago I took 15 bottles from the cellar to start the process of riddling – getting the dead yeast cells left over from secondary fermentation into the top of the bottle.  I thought I would do it an easy way and just put the bottles directly upside down into a rack, and gave them a twist every other day to help move the yeast downwards.

Although most of the yeast did settle in the cap, no matter what I did, there was always a thin deposit of yeast around the neck that just didn’t want to shift.

I have looked up how the riddling process is done traditionally and have found that they usually use additives to help the yeast settle and to stop it sticking to the glass. They also have a very specific method of twisting the bottles over a period of 3 weeks to get the yeast to move towards the cap.  Who would have thought that a tried and tested method developed over hundreds of years would be better than my ‘easy method’!

It’s too late for me to add any clearing agents now, but I can at least try the traditional method of riddling.  So, I have modified the rack to look like this:

And I will follow the procedure as shown here:

I have marked all the bottles with a white line so I can see what orientation they are in to help me follow the steps above.  If all goes well I still might have something ready to drink by Christmas…

So it looks like those French Champagne producers really did know what they were doing after all! The latest riddling process worked and so this morning I decided to disgorge 6 bottles to enjoy over Christmas. All looking very impressive with their caps and labels. Happy Christmas!

I’m so pleased that I managed to get some bottles of bubbly ready in time for Christmas. I proudly opened a bottle on Christmas Day, and took a couple of bottles to our family party over the Christmas holidays to see what they thought of my creation. My brother also arrived with a bottle of Nyetimber and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and announced that we would be holding a blind tasting!

After making sure all three bottles were at the same temperature, three glasses were poured out and labelled 1, 2 and 3. 1 being the Nyetimber, 2 being mine and 3 the Veuve Clicquot.

After some confusion over how we were meant to be judging the wine we decided to get tasters to simply state, a) which is your favourite and b) which do you think is Ben’s wine. Obviously my brother and I didn’t partake in the voting as we knew which was which, but this didn’t stop us from taking regular samples of all three wines!

This was all done for fun and wasn’t taken hugely seriously and I certainly wasn’t expecting to come out on top, but I couldn’t help but secretly hope that it wasn’t completely obvious to everyone which was mine, with tasters having to awkwardly pretend that it was hard to find a favourite. I was quietly buzzing with excitement as I watched everyone tasting the three wines in turn, genuinely trying hard to decide on which they preferred, and having to go back for re-tastes as they weren’t quite sure.

The Veuve, not unsurprisingly proved to be the favourite, but mine actually got two votes, beating the Nyetimber! Most people guessed correctly which one was mine, but still three voters got it wrong. So of course I’m completely over the moon with this. I really feel like after eight years of blood, sweat and tears, I have produced something I can be proud of.

Pretty much the only thing that made my wine stand out as the homemade wine from the other two, was the appearance. The two commercial wines were crystal clear, whereas mine had a very slight haze. Not much, but detectable if you are looking for it. I don’t add any finings or carry out any filtering, which Nyetimber and Veuve almost certainly do, so it’s fairly inevitable. I wonder if I could market this as a feature, like so many modern craft ales which are ‘intentionally cloudy to preserve flavour and freshness’. Recently there seems to be a huge rise in popularity towards natural products, so with my pesticide-free, unfined, unfiltered, organic wine it’s bound to be a winner!