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Part 3 of Mike Supple making Cabernet Sauvignon with a home winemaking kit. Step-by-step process from inhaling dangerous gasses to micro-waving cups of wine.
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You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple.

Today is Day 15 of my home winemaking experiment. At this point our wine should have fully finished fermenting, so I'm going to taste it to make sure that it tastes dry - all the sugar has been turned into alcohol. Then I'm going to rack it - that involves moving from the fermenter into a large carboy to separate it from the yeast and thick sediment and give it time to rest and clear up.

[Opens the bucket.] I can start to smell wine. Definitely some Cab aromas coming out of here as soon as I pulled the airlock off.

[Takes a deep breath inside the bucket and coughs.] Whoa! Don't inhale too close. Whatever gasses are floating on top there are volatile. [Cough.]

Now that it's open, let's take a sample of this and see what it's like.

It's fairly cloudy - not clear like you'd expect from a regular glass of wine, but that's from all the fine sediment and yeast still in it. It smells pretty fruity - some bright strawberry and dark cherry. Right now it's really fresh and fruity with a little bit of oak on the top from those oak chips. I can definitely smell fresh new oak. It's not overly complex, but it smells pretty good.

Give it a little taste here. It's definitely dry and that's what I'm tasting for. I don't know if it's supposed to taste like a full complex wine yet since this is the first time I've made wine, but it doesn't taste sweet. The sugar has all been turned into alcohol, so from that standpoint we're good to go. Otherwise it doesn't taste overly complex. It definitely has some fruity characters in there, but it's not too impressive. I'm hoping that over the next month or so as we let it rest it will build up and taste a lot more impressive. Because right now it just tastes kind of like some adequate, not very good, watered down wine. But we'll see.

The next thing we want to do is retest the specific gravity. The specific gravity should be around 0.995. It's at about the second line down [on the hydrometer] which looks like around 0.994. If you remember from last time, the temperature of the liquid is important when measuring specific gravity. Since our wine is 70 degrees we add on thousandth, making it 0.995. Right on target for dry red wine.

What does this mean? To figure out the alcohol you take the original number, subtract the final specific gravity and multiply by 130. This gives you the approximate alcohol content. So our wine is 1.097 - 0.995 = 0.102. X 130 = 13.26. Our wine is approximately 13% ABV, which is right where a good Cabernet should be.

Next we're going to siphon the wine into a clean carboy. That gets the wine off of the thick sediment in the bottom - the yeast and wood chips - and we can start letting the wine settle and clear up. So pull the plunger up and get the siphon going.

Now that we're done siphoning you can see all the oak and yeast left in the bucket.

The next step is to add sulfur. Sulfur acts as an antioxidant and an antiseptic. Antioxidant means it keeps the oxygen out and stops it from spoiling the wine. Antiseptic means that it cleans any bacteria or anything that might be in there to make sure we don't have any other spoilage happening. Mix about a half a teaspoon with some water and dump it in.

Next I'm going to be adding tannins. Tannins naturally occur when you make wine - the come from the grape skins, stems, seeds and we have some from the oak chips we're using. But because this wine is being made from concentrated grape juice it doesn't have as much tannin as it normally would if we were using crushed grapes, so we're adding a little more tanning. Tannins help to stabilize the wine and tannic acid helps wine to age.

Next we add Sparkoloid powder. What this does is help bind all of the fine sediment so it drops to the bottom and clarifies the wine. Then we can rack it again before we bottle it and end up with a nice clear wine.

It's best to have the level of the wine in the neck of the carboy so you don't have a lot of oxygen exposure. The instructions recommend topping it up with a similar type of wine or water. I'm a little skeptical about using water because I don't want my wine to taste watered down, but I also don't want to be spending more money on this project and throw in some other wine that will affect the flavor. So, I'm just using distilled water to test the kit. If it ends up tasting watered down then that is important to know before bothering to try this again.

Once it's full we close it back up with the fermentation lock and we'll let the wine sit for about 21 days. This way the Sparkoloid can help clarify the wine and get the sediment at the bottom so I can rack it again.