Bottling Your Homemade Wine

Reader Contribution by Staff
Published on January 19, 2009
article image
by Unsplash/Jeff Siepman

Finally, the wine you made last summer is still. There hasn’t been a bubble in the bung for weeks, so fermentation is complete.

It is time to bottle.

And then bottle some more. It was a great fruit year at my house, so we turned lots of apples, plums and Asian pears into wine. We will be bottling it all in the next few weeks, which sounds romantic until you do it. Here’s an intimate look at what home winemakers really do during the dark days of late winter.

1. We soak off labels.

One gallon of wine fills 5 standard wine bottles, so there never seems to be enough of them.Re-used wine bottles provide cool variations in shape and color, and they’re free. To soak off the labels, stand the bottles in a cooler or other deep container, and fill both the bottles and the cooler with hot water. Patience pays: wait at least 3 hours to start peeling.

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