Sweet Cherry Wine Bottling

It has been over two months since I brought home forty pounds of cherries to make into wine.  I washed, pitted and stemmed them all, mixed them with sugar and yeast (and a few other things) and set them in a fermenting bucket for a week.  After that I strained the mix into my glass carboy where it continued to ferment for a month.  Once the bubbling slowed way down, I mixed a little more sugar into the batch and then racked it into another carboy where it could finish fermenting over the next month.  Finally the time had come to bottle the wine.  The fermentation had been stopped for well over three weeks and the wine looked dark and clear in the carboy.

The final step was bottling the wine.  The actual bottling isn't very hard - just siphon wine out of carboy and into bottles and cork and done.  Its the work that takes place before this part that is most important.  I make sure that every bottle is clean inside by washing them in hot soapy water and rinse them out well.  Then I pour boiling water into each bottle to do a final sterilization before adding the wine.

 This wine is a beautiful ruby color and is very fragrant and sweet.  It already has good flavor and that should only improve with time.

In total I ended up with twenty-nine full bottles of sweet cherry wine.  Twelve of them will be going to pay back the two investors that gave me money up front to pay for the cherries.  The rest will be stored in a cool dark place where they can continue to age until I get around to sharing them with friends.  In all the cost of the wine was around $115 for the cherries and sugar which comes out to just under $4 a bottle.....not necessarily cheaper than the cheapest wine you can buy, but infinitely better.  Cheers!