Wine has been bottled!

I meant to share this a few days ago, but I've been under the weather, unfortunately, so I haven't really been myself.  Monday night I was ok though, and I'd been waiting for my wine to clear, which it was, Monday night!

I tasted it to see how it was, and I must say, it was (is) halfway decent!  Very impressed!

You know the drill by this time...

I siphoned all the wine from the carboy to the bucket for (supposedly) easier bottling.  Then I cleansed, rinsed, and sanitized all 24 of my bottles.  Next time, I will definitely have 30+ bottles, because I had more than 24 bottles-worth of wine.

After all that and before putting the wine in the bottles, I put in the potassium sorbate so that there would be no further fermentation in the bottles.

Then I went to bottling!  And making a couple messes!  Next time, this will happen outside... 

And voila!  We have bottled wine, folks!  I'm still going to need a few more bottles for the remaining wine, but I just haven't felt up to going and getting it yet.  I'll keep those last ones separate just in case something has happened during the time in between.

This has been a pretty cool process and I've absolutely learned from some mistakes.  I will be doing this again once I have some additional supplies (at least one more carboy, a taller table, a couple more bottle squirting cleaner things, enough bottles, etc.), but I really hope this batch is at least drinkable.  We shall see!  It has to stay in the bottles at least a month before attempting to drink, so I'll be drinking it next year (haha).  I'll let you know how it goes!  Cheers!

Wine Maker Certification

I ran across an interesting ad in my Wine Maker magazine today.  There is a Winemaking Certification Program at UC Davis, and I'm very interested in such a program!  I found another that's out of Texas Tech, and it looks like it might be in conjunction with Texas A&M University (Whoop!).  It's mostly online except for a couple classes that are 2.5 days long (I'm guessing maybe over a weekend..?).  It's called the Texas Winemaking Certification Program.  I might wait to see how my first wine turns out before investing too much extra time and money in a certification program, or maybe even my second wine, if the first one isn't any good.

Going to these websites also allowed me to find the Texas Winegrape Network.  I had no idea such a place exisited, but it really doesn't surprise me.  There's so much information on this site, if you (or I), ever needed to know anything about growing wine grapes or vineyards, or just about anything else winemaking-related, that's the place to go!

Day 16!

Still working on clarifying the wine.  I'm so anxious for it to be done!  I really hope it turns out well, but like I've said before, I won't get my hopes up too high for this first pancake!