That’s the “carboy” on top of the dryer.  It’s been about 30 days since we last added the clarifying stuff and the degasser.  Time to bottle.  I didn’t get a picture this time but we transferred the wine from the carboy into the bottles with a siphon tube.  The dark blue thing in the foreground of this pic is the Italian Floor Corker.

You drop the cork into the opening and press that round circle base down to insert your bottle.

You put your foot on the base to hold it steady . . . hold the bottle . . . . then as you press down on the lever/handle the brass compression fittings squeeze the cork to half it’s size in order to press it into the bottle.  It’s a super cool tool!  So far my favorite step in wine making. LOL

And there you go . . . . !  Tomorrow is Stage 3 – Wine Caps & Labels!

If you want to try making your own wine – start saving your bottles now.  Why buy bottles when you can just reuse them!  First stage of bottling was to wash the bottles – all 30 of them.

Then time to sanitize them.  Throughout the process of making wine it was always necessary to sanitize everything.  We had Maurene’s mudroom sink full of sanitized water at every step.

This is Maurene’s bottle tree.  This thing was very cool.  Just load them up to drip dry.

These will sit overnight and then corking tomorrow!!