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The day of bottling has arrived. The final steps before actually getting to drink this stuff and see if it's all been a waste of time and money.
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Transcript

You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple.

The big day is finally here - I finally get to bottle my wine. That doesn't mean I get to drink it yet, but I'm that much closer to see if this was just a big old waste of everybody's time or if it's worth drinking.

What I've already done today without wasting your time - I've racked it one more time and left a little more sediment in the bottle of the carboy, put all the wine into the big bucket so it's ready to bottle and leave all the sediment behind.

While I was racking I did taste the wine one more time and it tastes like wine. It's a little disjointed - the acid's a little high and the tannins are a little strong. Part of that is because it needs time to settle, so I'm hoping once it's bottled and has time to mature it will come along and start to mellow out. That's why wine isn't released right when it's bottled - because it does mellow at is sits. That should mellow out nicely and bring the flavors out, making some nice wine. But we'll only know in a couple of months when I try it again.

So I have this all set up and ready to go. The only new piece of equipment here is the bottle filling tube that I've attached to the end of my siphon tube. It's just a little plastic tube that has a nozzle on the bottle that will start and stop the flow. When you put the nozzle against the bottom of the bottle it starts the flow, and when you pull it up off the bottom it stops. That way I can go from bottle to bottle without creating a giant mess all over the floor or restart the siphon each time. That's the theory. We'll have to see if it works. I'll go ahead and put the filler in the bottle so it's ready to go and start my siphon.

The bottle is filling - that's a good first step. You can see the level of the wine rising in the bottle. We want to fill the bottle so there's only about an inch of air between the top of the wine and the cork, so we're going to stop the filling when the wine is just up into the neck of the bottle.

I've got my next bottle ready. Time to move the filler the next bottle. Push it against the bottom, and we're off.

Now that the bottles are all filled it's time to get the corks in them. I have my double lever Italian corker (that's what it's called) and my synthetic corks. Load the cork in the corker, put it over the bottle, center it and give it some muscle.

Meh. The cork's not quite the whole way in. It's in enough to stay but it doesn't look all that pretty. I'll keep trying to see if I can perfect it, but it just might be that this corker's not the best or that I'm not good at it yet.

For me the fatal flaw was getting the corks in. As you can see, they are not all exactly perfect. In fact, none of them are. There's a little cork sticking out here and there. Some of them were good - better than others. If anyone out there has tips on how to do it better I'm all ears. Fortunately all that matters is that the wine is sealed in there and no oxygen can get in.

If you want the corks to look a little bit better, one quick trick is to just turn the bottle upside-down and shove it down against the ground. That helps to push the cork a little further into the bottle and you end up with them looking much nicer.

The final step before we can drink them is to let them sit for the next month or two so they can get over their bottle shock and hopefully mellow out and taste...um...delicious. If we're lucky.

[Barking in the background.] The dogs are really excited about this process.