DANCE, SATYRS AND MAENADS! TONIGHT, WE KILL THE VINE

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by Melanie Fire Salamander

This marks the fourth year that my coven plans to put on a Dionysia at the equinox, and the fourth year we'll stomp grapes for ritual wine as part of the Sabbat. Each year we've managed to produce a drinkable wine, big reds our specialty. Nothing up to the products of the Loire Valley, say, but we've been happy with the results.

Making wine is fairly simple - simpler and more foolproof than brewing beer, I'm told. Probably the most important thing is to keep your tools as clean as possible, rinsing them thoroughly with sulfite solution. Of course, there are some things you can't keep clean - the grapes themselves, for example. You can hose them down, but any lab sample would reveal a host of microscopic fauna on their skins, including many that can sour the vintage. All our care just barely balances out the dirt the world sheds.

What keeps us from bottling vinegar, I think, is the gods' help. We dedicate our rituals to Dionysos, god of wine, his consort Ariadne and initiatrix Rhea, and we raise energy to imbue the trampled grapes (our future wine) with ecstasy and transformation. Deities beside us, we've made vintages that are palatable and even I think transformative. They've got a tingle that's more than alcohol alone.

Making ritual wine involves two intertwined processes, ceremony and winemaking. Ideally, you yoke both well in time and intent, so that the ritual makes sense with grape-stomping at its heart and the wine-making proceeds properly in ritual. Making each individual process work, however, entails different concerns.

Stomping Grapes in Ritual

To plan a ritual to Dionysos, as with any ritual dedicated to a specific god, you need time, an understanding of the god (gained in part through meditation) and possibly books and articles, depending on how closely you want to follow his original rites. Luckily, the ritual corpus of Dionysos is one of the most extensive and well-documented of all the Greek gods', even excepting the plays written in his honor. The books I've found particularly useful in finding pieces for Dionysos rites are Carl Kerényi's Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life and Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter and Walter Burkert's Greek Religion and Ancient Mystery Cults. I can also recommend a fantastic Web resource, the Perseus Project, at www.perseus.tufts.edu, which provides a rich library of references into Greek and Roman writers' settings of Dionysos' and many other myths.

Based on these resources and others, our Dionysias have grown in sophistication and in length over time. Our first ritual began with all participants making masks incorporating Dionysian elements such as grapes, ivy, panthers and so on. We then installed masks of Dionysos and Ariadne in prominent positions - the mask of the god stands in for the deity in Dionysian rites shown on many Greek vases. Next, we raised a circle and, wearing our masks, stomped the grapes to sad Greek flute songs, mournful because we were dismembering the god. Finally, leaving the masks on the altar, we raised ecstatic energy through a spiral dance and sent it into the masks and trampled grapes. We retained the grapes' juice to make wine imbued with ecstasy for our moons and Sabbats, and each ritualist took a mask at random, reading its symbols as divination.

The next year, our high priest BlackCat fell in love with the idea of the labyrinth - appropriate to Ariadne, whom we hailed as Lady of the Labyrinth. The Lady of the Labyrinth mentioned in the Linear B tablets from the Palace of Knossos has never been identified by her Minoan name; she has been associated with Rhea, Hera and other goddesses. We felt, however, that the evidence from Greek myth supported us in naming Ariadne - the woman most associated with the labyrinth in myth - as the labyrinth's queen. BlackCat and friends laid down an intricate tracing of flour at our ritual site the morning before the rite.

For our second Dionysia, we again had people make masks. We started the ritual by raising a circle; then each participant threaded the labyrinth, contemplating it as a path of transformation, a journey to the other side, to the deep internal source of change. By a second altar, BlackCat turned water into "wine" with the help of grape juice concentrate, symbolizing the transformation we sought. Following the pattern of the year before, we then stomped grapes and raised energy toward ecstasy and transformation through a spiral dance and put that energy into our masks and grapes.

For our third Dionysia, we took a step into greater depth and complexity. Fired up by the idea of creating our own mystery cult, we initiated Dionysian mysteries. I won't tell their secrets. I will say we made blindfolds, rather than masks, on which each participant wrote issues he or she wished to transform. We researched Greek and Latin texts dedicated to Dionysos to create a poetic ritual introduction from snippets of verse. We dedicated that year's ritual to a pair of goddesses, Rhea and Ariadne in our symbolic structure, who stand to Dionysos as mother/grandmother and lover, as initiator and one to be initiated. The ritual again incorporated a labyrinth, within which covener Birch set up stations symbolizing points of transformation in human life. And once again we stomped grapes.

This year, our plans are still in progress, and the ideas are flying fast. Creating a ritual for Dionysos, your problem is not a lack of material but an excess thereof. I can assure you, though, we will again stomp grapes.

Grape-stomping remains central to our Dionysia because it feels right. That feeling's part pure sensuality - there is no sensation quite like crushing grapes with your bare feet. Liquid velvet juice, grape skins like flesh. Like French kissing, it must be felt, it can't be described. And stomping grapes for the god makes an aesthetic balance. It follows that the outcome of a ritual to the god of wine and ecstasy should be wine and ecstasy. Further, a wine enhanced with the energy of initiation and transformation lends power to every ritual at which it is consumed. Much of each year's vintage is consumed at the next year's rite, powering the wheel to turn once again.

We drink a lot of wine at our Dionysias. The issue of wine-drinking was central to our initiating the yearly ritual, in fact. Covener Bestia Mortale and myself had come away from a Dionysia held at a public park, which location had required that no one drink alcohol. A ritual to Dionysos with no wine! Like a ritual to Bubastis with no cats, to Demeter with no acknowledgment of the growing grain. A ritual castrated. We brainstormed a different one with covener Iothalassa. We insisted that our Dionysias include wine.

Therein, of course, lies reason for caution. Drunkenness as such is not our goal. The myths of Dionysos remind his worshippers that the god's gift is a two-edged sword; his beauty balances with sudden violence, even death. An invocation to Dionysos from Elis asks that he come with Graces, lest his advent be too rough. So too we invoke social graces and constraints so our participants avoid violent drunkenness and the chaos that results. We encourage ritual-goers to drink in moderation - though the god does tend to exact puking sacrifice from at least one ritualist per year. Anyone who is drunk must stay the night. We support ritualists who don't drink in reaching ecstatic states otherwise; maenadic dancing by the bonfire is another way to honor the god, and even for wine-drinkers helps takes the edge off excess.

The real center of our ritual remains the grape-stomping, the part of winemaking most suited to community. Crushing the grapes necessarily gives a tragic tinge to the ritual, however, as the symbolism of breaking flesh and releasing juice is that of the Titans tearing Dionysos limb from limb.

You can read this death as a transformation into higher being. Rhea collected the god's parts and reconstituted him, Rhea who is also considered to have initiated Dionysos into the mysteries he later conveyed to the world. One of Dionysos' epithets is the Initiate; his mythos of all Greek gods' is the most about initiation itself, Burkert says. And mysteries cling to him; not only did he probably appear in the Eleusinian Mysteries, he was central to the Orphic cult and had his own separate, wandering colleges of priestesses and priests who held torchlit rites before the god's mask.

Dionysos' mysteries, patterning the life of the god, involved going through death to rebirth, transcending death. Burkert cautions us not to overread the god's Greek mysteries of transformation as a Christian leap to afterlife, but the sparkling hints we find in Greek writings and vasepaintings show joy beyond the grave, beyond the final transformation. The Lenaia, the god's winter solstice festival held in Athens and elsewhere, celebrated the birth of the new wine and the divine child Dionysos, a rebirth honored before an idol of the subterranean, dead Dionysos by a group of maenadic nurses. The transformation of grape into wine parallels the transformation of life through death to rebirth. Death remains the central hinge, though, and so we play sad songs.

Making Grapes into Wine

Knowing how to construct ritual around stomping grapes is essential to our Dionysias. Knowing how to make wine is essential in getting a decent drink out of the stompings. Bad wine would hardly honor the god. To make wine, you need grapes and the tools for processing them. I'll discuss these following and cover our wine-making process from grapes to bottled wine.

Buying the Grapes

For three of the last four years, we've gotten grapes from Lou Cella, who brings them up from California. Call (425) 255-0363 to get on his mailing list; he will contact you in late August to tell you when grapes will arrive. This year, he started taking grape orders September 2. He usually lets you pick the fruit up from his warehouse in south Seattle on September weekends, only on weekends, which suits a Dionysia held on the weekend nearest the equinox. Lou recommends you stomp or press your grapes right away, no more than two or three days after you get them, so the best idea is to pick them up the weekend of the ritual. (I really can't imagine having a Dionysia on a weekday.) We get from him Zinfandel grapes, a red varietal that is pretty consistent and easy for beginners to work with.

If you can get to Eastern Washington, though, you will get fresher, more local grapes and more varieties to choose from. Two years ago, Bestia and I went to Eastern Washington and did a short wine tour with my mother. That year, we bought Lemberger grapes from Harold Pleasant at Pleasant Vineyards in Prosser, WA, (509) 786-2016, and I think those made our best wine ever. Lemberger is a red German varietal; to check out what it tastes like, look for a Lemberger or a Blue Franc.

Getting grapes from Eastern Washington, however, requires more planning ahead and often more driving. I'd start in July if that's your plan. You may be able to piggyback on someone else's grape trip, but that takes coordination.

Whether you go with local or Californian grapes, you'll need to figure how many pounds you need. Your best bet as a beginning wine-maker is to try to fill a 5-gallon carboy (large glass container) with your finished wine. You can figure about 1 gallon of juice for every 15 to 17 pounds of grapes, but you also need to plan for racking the wine at least twice during its career - that is, at least twice you siphon the wine out of its original container into a second one, leaving at the original carboy's bottom the lees, an undrinkable sediment. If you start with around 100 pounds of grapes, after you've racked the wine off the lees a couple of times you should end up with enough wine to fill your 5-gallon container. This year, Zinfandel grapes ran $22 a lug (box) - the cheapest since 1983 - with a lug being 36 pounds of grapes. One hundred pounds thus would be a little less than three lugs.

We found Lou's and the Pleasant Vineyard's grapes through The Cellar Homebrew, 14411 Greenwood Ave. N., Seattle, WA, (206) 365-7660. The Cellar's people will fax you a sheet of Washington, Oregon and California grape growers who sell to home vintners. The Cellar is also where we get all of our wine-making tools and supplies, especially since the homebrewing place in the Pike Place Market closed.

Finding Tools and Supplies

One essential tool is a good wine-making book. My wine-making bible, which I also got at The Cellar, is From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine, by Jeff Cox. I got this book partly because we have some wine-grape vines, though we never get enough of a harvest to make wine from them. But even if you don't need the grapegrowing sections, I recommend the parts on wine-making; they cover everything. The Cellar also has some great handouts that give you visual aids as well as step-by-step instructions for wine-making. You can also find some good information on the Web.

The books and handouts will walk you through the tools you need. Some are a one-time purchase; some need to be replenished every year. The Cellar will sell you a home wine-making kit that covers nearly everything, and the Cellar's employees can help determine what else you need. This is what I work with:

    + One 15-gallon wine-crushing tub (primary fermentor) of food-grade
      plastic
    + Sodium bisulfite powder for sterilization
    + One 1-gallon jug in which to make sodium bisulfite solution
    + Washing tub, medical soap and hose with water for foot-cleaning
    + Cotton cloth to cover wine-crushing tub
    + Hydrometer and test jar
    + Several pounds of sugar (not always necessary; see below)
    + Acid test kit (though I think this is optional; see below)
    + Wine yeast
    + Sieve for pressing
    + Cheesecloth for pressing
    + Garbage bag for pressing refuse
    + One 6.5-gallon glass carboy
    + An airlock with a bored plastic cork
    + Up to five empty wine bottles

For later in the process you need:

    + One 5-gallon glass carboy
    + One or two more airlocks with bored plastic corks  (good  to  have  at
      least one to trade out)
    + Siphon hose
    + Twenty-five to thirty empty wine bottles, or more, depending  on  wine
      amount
    + An equal number of corks
    + Corker
    + Wine labels
    + Glue stick

Setting Up to Stomp

We've discussed grape-stomping from the ritual standpoint; here's a few things to know from the wine-making standpoint. Clean is big. Beforehand, hose down your grapes as well as you can and pick out any moldy ones you see. Clean your wine-stomping tub thoroughly, then rinse it with a solution of sodium bisulfite that you've dissolved in water in your gallon jug - the sodium bisulfite package will tell you the proportion. Then rinse the winestomping tub again with cold water.

You also need everyone's feet to be clean. We generally set up a footwashing station just before the wine-stomping tub that includes a basin of warm water with disinfectant medical soap and a hose to rinse off with. Ideally, you have foot-washers stationed by the soapy water basin. The footwashers get each person's feet soaped up, rinse them thoroughly with cold water and then have the washed person step directly into the grapes. That's about as clean as it gets.

Then stomp away. After the ritual, however woozy you feel, set aside the tub of crushed grapes - the "must" - with a cotton cloth or towel over it to keep off flies. Cotton lets the must breathe. For red wine, you leave the stems in the must; for white, you remove them.

Processing: The First Day After

The morning after the ritual, you start making your crushed grapes into wine. I remember the sunny morning after our first Dionysia, the blue sky streaked with clouds, the side door open as the yawning Iothalassa and myself dragged the wine-tub in and foolishly added water then sugar to the wine. We would have done well with our grapes to add neither. What determines whether you add sugar is your hydrometer reading (in real life, you'll never need to add water). Ideally, you'll figure out how to use the hydrometer ahead of time, when you don't have a hangover.

Before you read the hydrometer, clean it and all your tools, rinse everything that will touch the wine with sodium bisulfite solution to sterilize it, then rinse again with cool water. Next, you use the hydrometer to find out how much sugar you have in the must. Sugar is what the yeast eats and defecates again as alcohol, so the more sugar in your must, the more alcohol in your wine.

The essential measurement unit is Brix, or degrees Balling, which is the percentage of sugar in the grape juice. The sugar's presence raises the specific gravity of the juice above 1.000, which is the specific gravity of distilled water, which is why a hydrometer works.

Get your test jar, often a long thin tube you bought with the hydrometer (you can use the hydrometer cover as a test jar, but this is tricky and I don't recommend it). Fill the jar with juice only - no skins or stems. Float the hydrometer in the juice - this may take some doing. And look what level on the hydrometer the juice comes to. What you get from the hydrometer is specific gravity, which you can convert to Brix as follows.

   Specific gravity    Brix  % potential alcohol
      1.040 10.4  5.4
      1.045 11.6  6.1
      1.050 12.8  6.8
      1.055 14.0  7.6
      1.060 15.2  8.3
      1.065 16.4  9.0
      1.070 17.6  9.7
      1.075 18.7  10.4
      1.080 19.8  11.1
      1.085 20.9  11.9
      1.090 22.0  12.7
      1.095 23.1  13.1
      1.100 24.2  14.2
      1.105 25.3  15.0

After 1.100 specific gravity, the alcohol concentration that the yeast will produce after fermentation will be sufficient to kill the yeast before the juice's sugar is gone, leaving residual sugar to sweeten the wine. Such a high specific gravity is unlikely for your juice. If I got that reading, I'd try again; if the reading stayed high, I'd ignore it, unless I was very worried about oversweetness. The ideal Brix level for red grapes is said to be 22.0; white grapes run lower. I would be happy with any Brix over 19. Our Zinfandel and Lemberger grapes have always run higher than that, 24.0 to 25.0 or even higher (which is why we freaked out and added water, which was dumb). Our wine is pretty strong, and sometimes sweet, but it remains flavorful.

However, if your juice's Brix level is low, especially if your wine would finish with less than 10 percent alcohol, you'll definitely want to adjust the Brix upward by adding sugar. Not only does adding sugar raise the alcohol level, it cleans up some problems of low-alcohol wines such as a too-soft taste and a tendency toward wine disorders and infections. At least, an alcohol level of 10 percent is required to preserve the wine. Don't worry that adding sugar will make for a sweeter wine - a good wine yeast will eat all sugar to an original Brix of about 25. Jeff Cox recommends bringing wine up to a 12.5 percent level of alcohol.

To get a detailed account of how to add sugar to wine, check your book. My guess is that if you use ripe red grapes, you'll never need to know. But, just in case, here's an outline.

To get 12.5 percent alcohol, you want 230 grams of sugar per liter of original juice. To figure how many pounds of sugar to add to your must to get that, use the formula

Pounds sugar = (230-x)y÷455

where x is the grams of sugar per liter figured from the specific gravity of the must and y is the liters of must. The table following shows grams of sugar per liter figured from the specific gravity of a must.

   Specific gravity    Sugar grams/liter      Brix
      1.047 124   12.0
      1.051 135   13.0
      1.055 145   14.0
      1.059 157   15.0
      1.063 168   16.0
      1.072 188   18.0
      1.076 201   19.0
      1.081 213   20.0

So, if you have a specific gravity of 1.047 and thus a potential alcohol level of about 6.4 percent, you have 124 grams of sugar per liter in your must. 230 minus 124 is 106, the grams of sugar to add per liter. Suppose you have 20 liters of must; you'd multiply 106 by 20 for 2,120 grams. Because there are 455 grams in a pound, you divide 2,120 by 455, to get 4.66 pounds of sugar to add to your 20 liters of must. The sugar you add should be pure white table sugar rather than turbinado or brown.

After adjusting sugar levels as necessary, the next step the books recommend is to test acidity. Grapes from hot regions tend to be aciddeficient; the resulting low-acid wines taste bland, aren't thirstquenching and are subject to wine disorders. Home growers in the Northwest are more likely to get high-acid grapes, producing wine that leaves an unpleasantly sharp taste in the mouth, like biting a lemon.

If you're worried about improper acidity, I would definitely consult a book. Correcting acidity can be a highly technical process, easily screwed up by woozy morning-after pagans. We have always skipped this step without negative result, given good grapes and the gods' help. The potential problem in doing so is that you may find, too late, that you have a wine that's undrinkably bland or tart.

After dealing with acid, or not, your handouts and books will tell you to add crushed Campden tablets. Doing so adds sulfite to the wine, so as to kill off wild yeasts. The wild yeasts of America, or so I've read, cannot produce a full fermentation but die off leaving only 4 to 6 percent alcohol and a very sweet wine. Some introduce bitter or vinegary tastes or form hydrogen sulfide gas, which makes the wine smell like rotten eggs.

Here again, my coven's vintners depart from the books. At this point, it's a matter of taste. If you add sulfite to wine, traces can remain, smelling of sulfur. Some people are allergic to sulfites. And it's a chemical you can actually choose to avoid, in this case. So we do. We've had no problems leaving sulfite out, probably because when we introduce the wine yeast to the must, that faster-acting yeast kills off the wild strains. We also don't add sulfite to the wine later on.

The main issue with leaving out sulfite, if you call it one, is that the wine doesn't last overnight. If you open a bottle of our Dionysia vintage, you have to finish it! Usually that's not a problem in the context of a large ritual, where most of our wine is drunk. Bestia Mortale says our wines remind him of those of his youth, which were never sulfited.

Cleanup, hydrometer test, sugar addition if needed, acidity test, acid correction if needed, sulfiting if desired - these are the processes of the first day. After that, you can put the cloth back over your tub and rest easy for a while. Tomorrow, you add the wine yeast.

Processing: The Next Few Days

Which wine yeast to use is highly debated. Montrachet wine yeast, though otherwise a winner, is said to produce sulfur smells in wine. I generally use whatever the people at The Cellar recommend for my grapes, all reds so far; the dreaded Montrachet has worked fine for me. Whatever you do, use yeast that's recommended for wine, which can tolerate a high alcohol level before dying out.

The yeast arrives dormant in little freeze-dried packets. The packets say how much yeast to add to your must; for my musts, stomped from 100 pounds of grapes, I've added two packets. Too much yeast isn't a problem; you want the yeast to multiply. The only problem is too little yeast.

To start the yeast, add it to a cup of lukewarm (not hot) water. Then drop it in your must, and put the cloth back over the tub. To encourage the yeast, you'll want your must inside now; yeasts like warmth.

That's all you do the second day.

Within 12 to 24 hours, maybe a little longer, the must will start to bubble. Your wine's fermenting! (If not, try adding more yeast.) This primary fermentation process will take from three to nine days, depending on the temperature. On our first outing, it took about three days, on the second and third outings about nine, which I think had everything to do with cold weather.

For a big red wine, such as the ones we make, we leave the skins in the must the whole time, though we pick out as many stems as we can - too many stems means too much tannin. For red wine, you will want twice a day to punch down the "cap" of skin material that forms on the juice using a big wooden spoon or two-by-four. Punching down the cap allows oxygen to get to the wine and continue the fermentation process. For a white wine, you'll want to press the juice off the skins the first day after crushing, but leave the juice fermenting in a cloth-covered container.

When your wine's Brix has dropped about two-thirds, to a specific gravity of about 1.030 or 1.040 for reds or 1.010 for whites, you'll transfer the wine into one or more carboys. This transfer is the beginning of the longer, slower secondary fermentation, which completes the wine's dryness. For a red wine, you now press the wine off the skins.

Be prepared for pressing to take about an hour. It helps if two people work on it. Your tools are a plastic garbage bag to take the skins - they make great compost, or if you're really ambitious you can make grappa - a big sieve and one or two pieces of cheesecloth. Before starting, clean your sieve and cheesecloth and rinse them with sodium bisulfite solution and then cool water.

Next, drag your must tub somewhere spill-proof, or set down newspapers to catch drips. Then scoop a big chunk of skin material into the sieve and let it drain over the tub. Once draining has slowed, put the solids in the cheesecloth and squeeze them out, then toss them into the garbage bag. Repeat again and again till all floating solids are gone from the tub. While you do this, try to avoid stirring the bottom of the vat, which will be all grape seeds and spent yeast.

Once you've gotten the floating junk out, you can either pour or siphon the remaining juice out of the tub into your bigger, 6.5-gallon carboy. I'd pour only if you're sure you can pour only juice. Fill your carboy just to the shoulder, leaving room for foam from the secondary fermentation. This foam shouldn't touch the airlock sealing the carboy, lest it spurt through and draw mold and flies.

Then shut your carboy. To do so, fill an airlock half-full with water, then shove its cork into the carboy's mouth. Doing so will take some force, so it's good to have someone around who's endowed with upper body strength.

You may have a little more juice left after you've filled your carboy to the shoulder. If so, grab some empty wine bottles, clean and sterilize them and siphon the remaining juice into them, up to their shoulders as with the carboy. Then cover them with balloons (or unlubricated condoms). Instant airlocks!

Now you have some very new wine. If you siphoned it, you probably got a taste of it - pretty bad as yet. This embryonic wine next should go into a space where the temperature stays in the 60s, probably a basement, garage or shed. Leave the wine there throughout its secondary fermentation.

This process takes one to ten weeks, after which the wine's ready for its first racking. Zinfandels want a first racking after about three weeks; most other wines can ferment till Yule, the traditional time of the birth of new wine and of Dionysos. The best way to know when to rack your wine is to check periodically and see if there's a slight rim of bubbles remaining at the wine's top.

Racking the Wine

Racking is pretty simple - you siphon the wine off the lees into a second carboy. If you had extra wine that went into bottles, remember to decant this wine to new bottles as well. Make sure the second carboy and new bottles are clean and sterilized before you start.

When racking after the secondary fermentation and later, you fill the new carboy or bottle into its neck, about an inch below the airlock cork or bottle top. You don't want much air in your carboy or bottle at this point; from now on, air is your enemy, trying to oxidize your wine and reduce its quality. For good siphoning, make sure the full carboy stands higher than the new, empty one, and make sure to position your siphon tube above the first carboy's lees, which at first racking are loose and easily drawn into the siphon. Now siphon away! Once the second carboy is filled, close it with an airlock. Toss off the lees, and clean the first carboy now - it's a lot harder to clean later.

What if you have wine left in your first carboy? Again, get some wine bottles and fill them. If you don't have enough wine to fill your new carboy into its neck, you need to top the wine off. Having a few extra balloon-headed bottles helps here. Failing that, top off the carboy with store-bought wine made from the same grapes, for example a Zinfandel wine if you stomped Zinfandel grapes.

At this point, don't neglect to drink a glass or two of your baby wine. Now you can get an idea how the finished wine will taste. It won't be dense and complex yet, but you'll begin to discover its characteristic features.

After its first racking, the wine ideally goes into a still colder chamber, one that gets down to the 30s. If you know anyone with an unused refrigerator, ask to borrow it. What you're after is to cold stabilize your wine. Cold stabilization gets rid of potassium bitartrate crystals, a cosmetic plus, and it slightly reduces acidity, good for reds left on the skins. But don't worry - if you can't find your wines a cold home, it's not essential.

You do, however, want to leave the bulk of your wine alone over the winter. Forget about it, if you can. As long as you can forget it, it can age. Even a white or light red is usually best drunk no younger than a year, and fullbodied reds can happily age two years or more.

Once you think your wine is sufficiently aged, it's time to bottle it - its finishing touch.

Bottling the Wine

To bottle the wine, you need corks, a corker and lots of bottles.

Collecting bottles is a process that takes a few months, the span of time depending on how much wine your household drinks. Solicit bottles from your friends! A gallon of wine fills about five wine bottles, so for a 5-gallon carboyful of wine you'll need 25 to 30 bottles and the same number of corks. I'd get a few extra of both, just in case. Prefer colored bottles, as they protect the wine better from light. Thicker glass and a punt (indentation) at the bottle's bottom also indicate a better, more protective type of bottle.

As soon as the bottles are emptied, or when you receive them, rinse them thoroughly. Just before filling them with wine, run them through the dishwasher. Then rinse each one with sodium bisulfite and cool water. Cleanliness is always a concern.

Another thing some vintners do just before bottling is to take final measurements of pH, acidity, sugar and alcohol. We've never bothered, but it's a nice thing for your bottles' labels.

To cork effectively, you'll need to steam the corks to render them soft. To do so, bring a pot of water to a boil and drop in your corks, covering the pan with a lid. About five or ten minutes of steaming should do.

You will definitely need a corker to stopper your bottles; you can't pound corks in with a hammer. The corker should come with directions. Corking the bottles itself is pretty easy - it's siphoning the wine that takes the time and trouble.

It's best to have two people siphoning wine into bottles. Bottles are harder to siphon to because they're many and little and you have to pinch the siphon hose off while trading bottles. You will definitely want newspapers laid down, and probably some enzyme cleaner to tackle spills. Siphon carefully, patiently and steadily; fill bottles to a level a halfinch below where the cork bottom will hit, assuming the cork's top is flush with the bottle top. As when racking, you'll want to avoid siphoning up the lees.

When all your wine is bottled, you're done! Wipe the sweat from your brow. If you have the strength, it's a good idea to label your wine now, just in case at some point you need to distinguish it from another wine, say your next vintage. Cute labels are good but not required - the simplest thing is to scrawl something on paper then glue-stick the paper to bottles. If you're going to store your bottled wine, for best results get a wine rack that holds bottles with cork-end angled down.

All that's left is to drink the wine, probably in ritual, imbued as it is with ecstasy and transformation. Libate freely to Dionysos and your tutelary deities as you do, and celebrate your vintage. Perhaps there'll be many to come.

Melanie Fire Salamander, a maenad, Sylvan Tradition witch and Tarot reader with more than 20 years' experience, reads cards at Stargazers 10-1 Tuesdays and 10-2 Wednesdays. She can also help you create personal ritual, work through energy blocks and meet spirits and deities in meditation. Call (425) 885-7289 or e-mail melaniefiresalamander@hotmail.com for an appointment.

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