Bottling Up the Apple Cider Wine

I started fermenting a batch of apple cider wine about two months ago as I outlined in this post.  In the past couple weeks, the wine has cleared completely and left a thick layer of yeasty sediment at the bottom of the bottles.  This is how I knew that the wine was finished fermenting.  I was afraid that I left it in the primary fermenter for too long because they only seemed to bubble for a couple days after they were transferred to the glass carboys and fitted with airlocks.  When I did the sniff test to see if it was wine and not vinegar, I was happy to smell something that definitely smelled like wine.

I carefully carried the carboys to my kitchen and tried to disturb the sediment at little as possible.  Then I put a pot of water on to boil so I could sterilize the bottles that I was going to put the wine into.  Some instructions recommend using a chemical sterilizing agent before bottling wine, but I have found that rinsing the bottles with boiling water seems to work just fine.

After the bottles had been rinsed with the boiling water and allowed to dry briefly, I used a siphon to transfer the wine from the carboys into the bottles, doing my best to keep the sediment from being sucked into the bottles.  When it was all said and done, I had six and a half bottles of apple cider wine to show for my efforts.  Not bad for $20!

You may notice that a couple of these bottles look a bit cloudy.  I'm guessing I wasn't as good at keeping the sediment out as I wanted to be, so these bottles will probably be used first.  It is probably why most recipes call for racking the wine a time or two before bottling.  I was afraid to rack this wine because I thought they might get too much exposure to air and become vinegar instead, so I opted to just bottle it.  Next time I will shorten the time I leave it in the primary fermentation stage and make sure that I rack it at least once before bottling.  After it has aged for a few months I will get my first taste of the first batch of apple cider wine I have ever made.  I can hardly wait!