Day 15!

We're in business, folks!  0.994!  

I'm glad I cleaned and sanitized everything yesterday so I could focus on racking the wine today.  I siphoned the wine from the carboy to the bucket, carefully, trying not to make a mess.  I then brought the carboy up to the tub to wash it, cleanse it, and sanitize it.  I meant to take a pic of all the sediment left in the carboy (there was a lot!), but I totally forgot.  Just trust me, there was quite a bit!  

I cleaned it out with my cleansing brush, sanitized it along with the auto-siphon and tubing, and took them all back down with me.

This process REALLY makes me wish I had another carboy because I would've been done a lot sooner.  Nonetheless, I siphoned all of the wine back into the cleaned and sanitized carboy...all while fighting with the tubing.  I would have put the bucket on the table to let gravity help me, but it was just too heavy.  Plus I needed to save my strength to lift the carboy!  

Once I got all the wine back into the carboy, I was left with quite a large space at the top, and a lot of gas.  I attached my degasser to my power drill and went to degassing and, again, not making a mess or a wine volcano!

I was able to get a lot of the gas out (I hope enough!), then I added the potassium metabisulfite, mixed it up, then added the liquigel and siligel, in their proper order, and mixed a little more.  After adding everything needed, I needed to top off the wine to within 2" of the top of the carboy, which took two bottles of finished white wine, as recommended by the instructions.  

Thanks to these bottles for contributing to the effort!

I mixed a little more just to make sure everything was combined.  

Before I put in the extra wines, I did manage to get a little taste just to see how everything is coming along.  My assessment is that it is still very green, but it absolutely has potential!  

So now there's more waiting, at least 7-10 days to allow the wine to clarify enough to start putting it into bottles, which I still need more of!  I only have about 10, so it sounds like I'll need to start either start drinking or asking for donations!  Or maybe both! :)

Happy wine-making! 🍷