Adventures in Homemade Wine Making – Part 3

The wine is finally ready! And it’s damn good!

I started my wine adventure back in early October with 32 gallons of grape juice, about 6 weeks later I had almost 100 bottles of tasty homemade riesling wine ready to drink. 

I ended up making 4 styles of wine from my riesling grapes: a dry sparkling wine, an extra-dry still wine with lots of minerality, a dry still wine with more fruit flavors, and an oaked dry wine. My total wine output for the 2019 vintage resulted in 88 full bottles of still wine and 24 mini bottles of sparkling wine, for a total of 94 full bottles worth of riesling!

I am excited to share the final chapter of this year’s wine making saga (click back to part one and part two) along with actual wine with whomever is willing to let me talk their ears off about the process in exchange for a (hopefully) delicious glass of homemade wine white.

Sparkling Wine

When I first picked up my grape juice from Dave at Potek Winery, we discussed the style of riesling he makes and what I was thinking about making. He recommended that I try making some sparkling wine out of my juice as this was something he did earlier in his wine making career. He even gave me a bottle of his old sparkling riesling to try. It was dry and funky and fun. Thus, early in the process, this seed of an idea was planted in my head as something I wanted to try with some of my wine. So much so, that when I was sourcing my wine bottles I decided to buy a case of mini bottles (187 ml) so I could make some fun little sparkling wines if the opportunity presented its self. 

7 days after primary fermentation ended and I racked the wine into 3 fresh carboys, I again tested and tasted the wines to gauge their progress. 

Over that week, the wine progressed quite a bit as the remaining yeast continued to eat away at the sugars in the wine. The brix (a measurement of a wine’s sugar content) of my riesling had dropped significantly from around 4-7 brix to right around 0 brix. 

• Wine A dropped to 0.5 brix with an ABV of about 12.4%
• Wine B dropped to 0 brix with an ABV of about 11.9%
• Wine D dropped to -1.5 brix with an ABV of about 12.6%

These measurements meant that wines B and D were ready to stop fermenting and rack into fresh carboys. Wine A on the other hand still had some fermenting left, which presented the perfect opportunity to make a méthode ancestrale sparkling wine. 

Méthode ancestrale (ancestral method) is the oldest style of making sparkling wine and was the only method of making sparkling wine up through the end of the 18th century, at which point the Traditional Method (how Champagne is made) was invented. The ancestral method involves bottling the wine while it is still fermenting, allowing the yeast to continue eating way the sugar inside the bottle. All the while, the yeast are excreting alcohol and CO2. Since there is no where for the CO2 to escape to with the bottle sealed off, it dissolves into the wine, creating the carbonation and bubbles that makes sparkling wines so great. 

I decided to give this a try with wine A. When I tasted this wine it had a crisp dry flavor with a nice nose of light tropical fruits and dry apple cider. I did a bit of research and found that it might benefit the flavor (and the future bubbles) to add a bit of extra sugar to the wine before I sealed it up. This could provide a little more fuel for the yeast to use to make CO2 (bubbles) and if it didn’t eat all the sugar, the extra would sweeten it up a bit.

I dissolved 3 oz (weight) of white sugar in 250 milliliters of wine. Using a sanitized dropper, I added about 10 milliliters to each tiny bottle, filling the other 177 milliliters with wine A.

With sparkling wines you need a special bottle that can withstand higher potential internal pressure than regular wine bottles or even beer bottles. Then, instead of topping it with a cork you use a bottle cap. Even the fancy champagne houses of France top their bottles with bottle caps for the bottle fermentation process. Only when the process is finished do they remove the bottle cap and replace it with a cork for the consumer’s pleasure.

I decided to go with some fun American flag bottle caps to make sure everyone knows this is an American sparkling wine!

Homemade American Bubbly.

The final push – 3 more wines in 3 weeks

After bottling part of A into the mini bottles, I racked and added 3/8 teaspoon of sulfites to B and D to fully stop fermentation and stabilize the wine. I did a lot of research and tried to calculate what the minimum effective dose of sulfites would be that would still kill any remaining yeast and keep my wines tasty! I left A as was to finish fermenting. It only took 3 more days until A was finished fermenting and was ready for its own racking and sulfite treatment. At this point significant settling had occurred in the other 2 carboys as well so I racked them as well.

This was a good opportunity to taste the wines again to see how they were evolving. Depending on taste I could adjust them by blending them in some way or moving by my bottling window either later or earlier than planned. Luckily they were progressing along amazingly and no alterations were required.

Wine B was sweet and delicious with more fruit flavors. It was shaping up to be a good off-dry style Riesling. Wine D was super dry, with lots of minerality and lime! I thought it tasted very typical of dry German rieslings of the Mosel Valley. Wine A still had some tropical notes to it and its dryness was between the other two wines. It was also a bit earthy, making me think it might be interesting to try oaking this wine!

I had done a bit of research into the aging of aromatic white wines, like riesling, with oak. It not very uncommon, but some wine makers have experimented in doing so, specially in the Finger Lakes region of NY.

I had some left over oak cubes from our 2017 Malbec vintage that I decided might be good to mix in with wine A. They are basically little dice sized cubes of oak left over from the barrel making process. Smelling one of these cubes along with wine A seemed to produce an interesting flavor profile, so I took the plunge, putting 9 little oak cubes into wine A’s carboy. They stayed in there for 3 weeks until the wine was bottled turning the wine a slightly darker shade of golden color than the other two wines. 

Handful of oak cubes.

At this point my goal was to let the wine sit the carboys and let gravity do the hard work of clarifying the wine. Yeast and other sediment naturally sinks to the bottom over time, along with racking, the wine is steadily clarified. The caveat is that each racking also introduces more oxygen contact to your wine. Most wine makers use chemicals to aid/speed the clarifying process and reduce this potential oxidization, but I have not found this necessary. Plus, I believe greatly in trying to use as little chemicals as possible in the wine making process.

3 weeks later the wine was clear and ready to bottle.

I did not again have to rack any of the wine after this initial racking until bottling day about 3 weeks later. At that point all three wines were crystal clear and ready to bottle!

Bottling Day!

November 17, 2019 –

After about 6 weeks of wine making, my still riesling was ready to bottle. They looked great, and even though it was 6am on a weekday, I needed to give them a final taste before bottling. They were all very good. Wine D had a light apricot smell and was super dry, with tons of minerality and a bit of bitter lime flavor. Wine B had a floral and peach smell, with a medium dry yet sweet flavor, with good acidity and stone fruit flavors. Wine A had a bit of sweet vanilla smell from the oak mixed in with floral notes, with a complex vanilla taffy and stone fruit flavor.

Once the short tasting was complete it was ready to get on with the hard work. 

Even though all my bottles were new, prior to putting wine in them each bottle had to be rinsed to clean out any dirt or dust that might have settled in them. Then each one had to be rinsed again with a sulfite solution to sanitize them. Being a tiny production meant I had to hand rinse and hand spritz each of the 88 bottles individually. This bottle cleaning/sanitizing process took over an hour of very tedious work. 

Next, I had to precisely fill each bottle to the proper level to allow space for the cork and a small air gap for compression when corking. Since I was alone as this point and I only had my little siphon tool to aid in filling each bottle, it was quite the task to find a way start the siphon, fill each bottle close to the top without overflowing and yet stop the siphon in a way so that I would not have to restart it via hand pumping again. It probably took me a good 15 minutes and about a bottle worth of wasted wine before I finally came up a good solution.

I sat cross legged on the ground with the carboy of wine above me in a chair and a legion of soon to be filled wine bottles around me. The position allowed me to lower the tube below the level of the carboy to start the wine flowing via gravity, then when the bottle was about to the top I would raise the whole bottle and tube setup above the level of the wine in the carboy to slow and then stop the flow of wine. With the tube raised high above my head in one hand, I would place the full bottle on one side of me and grab a fresh empty one to start the process again. It was not an elegant solution, but once I got in the flow of it, I was moving along at a pretty fast pace. 

Once the bottles were all “filled” I began fine-tuning the levels in each bottle until each was perfect for corking. 

Inspecting my washing and bottling setup.

The corking process was again quite a task as I was using a small hand corker. It was the same one Jack and I had used in the past, but it back then it was a lot easier bottling a 3rd as many bottles with two people! It is not the fastest tool, but it is cheap and gets the job done just fine. At least with this step Alena was around to help.  

Alena helped bottle a few.

Finally it was over. I started the bottling process at around 6am, by 9am all 88 bottles were cleaned, filled and corked. Time to drink!

The Drinking

Since bottling my riesling, I have been lucky enough to proudly share it with about 50 people so far. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Friends, family and strangers have all been delighted with the wine. I have even received some truly outstanding reviews from people saying this is the best riesling or even the best white wine that they have ever tried before. 

Every group I have shared the wines with have had a mix of favorites. About a third of people love the super dry wine D, with its limey and minerality notes. About half of people are drawn to the slightly sweeter but still dry wine B, with its more fruity and floral flavors. And the remaining find wine A to be their favorite with the slight oak and vanilla flavors mixing with the citrus notes. 

Even the sparkling wine has turned out great, with tiny little bubbles and a nice dry flavor. People were shocked to taste a home made sparking wine. 

I would normally be quite skeptical of my friends’ and family’s positive reviews but every time I taste my wine, I am so proud of how damn good it has turned out. The dry and off-dry styles taste true to typical riesling styles and the oaked and sparkling wines are quite delightful and fun. 

Even though the results turned out excellent, I certainly made some mistakes along the way and learned a great deal from them. I look forward to continuing my wine making journey with the learnings and successes of the 2019 vintage in under my belt. In 2020 I hope to make good on my 2019 plans to make a both white and red wine. I am always looking for connections for buying grapes or to team up to make some wine!

Special thanks to the people who helped to support me in the 2019 vintage including Dave Potter and his team at Potek and Muni Wineries, BYOB homebrew shop in Santa Barbara, and my family, friends and co-workers for listening to me talk their ears off about my wine and letting me share the final product with them once it was finally done.

And most of all, a HUGE thanks to Alena for her help in various stages of the process, her support and ideas when I was working through issues, and her amazing patience in letting me take over a large portion of our patio and living room (and sometimes kitchen) with all my wine making equipment! Alena you are the best partner any wannabe winemaker could every ask for!

Cheers!

– Alan Evans