I really don’t know why I have a propensity of waiting six months to use my Christmas presents. Kathy gave me a filter for Christmas. We did not filter wines and Kathy made a Muscat that has sediment in the bottle. Normally sediment doesn’t bother us. However, once you pour a glass of the Muscat and tip the bottle back up, the sediment immediately mixes with the wine in the bottle and turns yucky. Of course if we decant the wine, we can get most of it out of the bottle before the sediment reaches the neck. The sediment in the Muscat was probably the motivation to give me a filter for Christmas.
Kathy made peach wine last fall. We racked it a couple times, but just stalled filtering and bottling the wine. So today, I pulled out the filter, read the directions twice, then filtered the wine. Prior to filtering, the wine had a straw color and the aroma and taste reminded me of the white peaches we used to make the wine. After filtering, the wine was still a straw color but the aroma and taste changed a bit. It resembled more of a peach cobbler than a white peach.
The filter worked well. It was easy to put in the filters after placing them in water for a minute. We did run a solution of potassium metabisulfite through the filter mostly because I get very concerned about sanitization. I then ran water through the filter to rinse out the potassium metabisulfite solution. Kathy and I then filtered the wine. We caught the first liquid to come through the filter thinking that it was mostly water. Afterward we started filling a sanitized carboy. We left just a bit of the wine in the first carboy along with some sediment that covered the very bottom of the carboy.
The level of wine in the carboy is down a bit after filtering. I assume we lost a bit at the beginning of the filtering, left a bit in the carboy along with the sediment, and did thief off a couple of glasses of wine prior to and after filtering. Since we are going to back sweeten, we needed some extra room in the carboy, so things seem to work out. If I were to guess, it looks like we may have lost a bottle of wine in the process. We were told to wait a few days before bottling, so we’ll bottle early next week.
We are looking forward to some peach wine this summer. When our temperatures reach over 90º it’s nice to have a glass of peach wine with a frozen peach slice in the wine. Bring on the heat!
Cheers,
Terry
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