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This red stuff actually starts to taste like wine in part 4 of the Home Wine Making series.
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You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple.

Today we are into day 35 of this home wine making experiment. All we're doing today is racking the wine. What that means: we're taking our wine out of the carboy and siphon it into a large bucket. We siphon carefully to remove the wine from small sediment. Then we're going to put it back into the [cleaned] carboy and let it continue to age. So "racking" is removing the wine from the sediment.

It's a fairly simple process. Take the top off and get my siphon ready. Make sure the other end of your hose is in the bucket. You don't want to end up with wine pouring everywhere.

The way this siphon is set up it actually sits about a half inch off the bottom of the container. That way I can pull all the wine out of the carboy into the bucket and leave just a little bit of wine and sediment behind. That way I can get nice clear wine without a bunch of junk in it.

I'm curious how the wine is coming along so I'm going to grab a quick taste while it's siphoning.

It smells like wine - has some nice bright cherry smells. Nothing particularly exciting. A little cherry, a little strawberry. Still smells really young - has a hint of yeast.

Hmm...that tastes significantly better than last time (3 weeks ago). It actually has pretty good body now, good acid, a little tannin and I can taste some oak from the oak chips - a little vanilla and cedar - along with dark cherry. It does have pretty nice body and might actually be turning into wine. I'm pretty shocked, because the last time I tasted it, it was really underwhelming.

I'm somewhat excited now to see what happens over the next couple of weeks. Let it rest in bottles and see how it evolves because it is really coming along, and I might be pleasantly surprised in about a month and a half.

You can see some sediment and sludge left in the bottom of the carboy. The wine that's left in there is full of fine sediment, which is why I left some wine in there - we don't want that mess in our finished wine. Now I need to rinse the carboy out, put the wine back in it and let it age for a couple more weeks.

After I got the wine back in, I topped it up with some distilled water to get the level of the liquid back into the neck of the carboy. This is to make sure the wine has minimal contact with oxygen. The last step is to put the air lock back on and let it sit for another couple of weeks.