Red, Red Wine

So, how long do you think it would take to bottle about 18 gallons of wine? Well, it takes a lot less time than it used to for me. Why? A handy-dandy little device called the Enolmatic, which was my birthday present this year.  The picture to the right is from the Tenco website, who manufactures the Enolmatic.

We used this device to bottle four different wines, those wines include our 2008 Syrah, 2008 Cabernet Franc, an "accidental blend" we are calling Cab Fusion, and our "on purpose blend" we're calling Howling Good Red.  Earlier I mentioned that I was going to make 3 gallons of the Howling Good Red, but I decided to up it to 5 gallons.

This was the first time I got to use the Enolmatic for bottling.  I cannot stress enough how much easier this device made the whole experience.  The Enolmatic uses a vacuum pump to move the wine from the carboy to your bottle.  You just put your bottle up against the nozzle, the Enolmatic will suck the air out of the bottle, while pumping in the wine at the same time.  Bottling wine can be done by one person now!  The old method was using an auto-siphon and a bottle filler.  Someone would have man the auto-siphon, and someone would have to man the bottle filler.

Overall, we ended up with about 16 bottles of the 2008 Syrah, 15 bottles of Cab Fusion, 26 bottles of 2008 Cabernet Franc, and about 25 bottles of Howling Good Red.

One last thing about Enolmatic, you can also use it for racking between carboys.  Unless you are using those new plastic carboys, the vacuum would likely make those implode.  Yet another reason why I prefer glass carboys.