Winemaker 101

With five more gallons still to bottle, it was with a sad heart that I picked up six dozen bottles from a buddy. Yes- it means we'll soon bottle our last carboy of wine. But it also means another bottle washing and label peeling marathon.

When I was loading up my car, he mentioned that his grapes didn't do so well this year. He felt he would only get about 5-6 gallons of juice and is considering not even going through the trouble of harvesting. "Too much work for only 25 bottles of win

Well we put the new Portuguese Wine corker through it's paces and have given it the "Kilted Piper Winery" seal of approval. What a well designed piece of equipment. We were able to bottle 11 gallons before running out of clean bottles. Only the 5 gallons of concord grape wine remains in the carboy. We had eleven mostly single gallons of fruit wine (five bottles each) of: blackberry, blueberry, boysenberry, peach, cherry, raspberry, pineapple, chardonnay, apple spice, and even a mint wine. The

I've bottled about 25 gallons of wine before-- using only the plung corker and a rubber hammer. No kidding. I tried another hand corker type but found it hard to use. This year we plunked down $60 bucks and bought a Portuguese floor corker. After playing with it I think this is going to be a winner. We're setting up to bottle this coming weekend. Labor Day weekend proved to be too hot... 107 for two days in a row and sitting in a pool sounded like a whole lot more fun.

So this weekend