Adventures in Wine-Making, Day Nine

Sorry for the delay. I got distracted. This week, on Dirty Jobs, my Dirty Boy was making all kinds of Dirty Jokes about his Dirty Tool. I had to go to bed for two days with the Dirty Vapors...

But I'm back now, and ready to tell you all about Day Nine!

Day Nine is when you put it -- the juice/wine/must stuff, whatever you call it at this stage -- into the secondary fermentor. Which is just a fancy way of saying "clean bucket." Or bottle, as the case may be.

As the case is here:

That's it when it was still up on the counter full of sterilizing fluid. A.K.A. bleach.

No! A.K.A. not bleach! I was only kidding about the bleach! A.K.A. Something Else! I don't know what it is because Johnny's in charge of Buying Stuff, but it comes in a package that says "sterilizing jazz" (or something along those lines) so that you know it's not really just bleach -- just like you know that what's in a package labeled "lips and assholes" is not really just hot dogs.

Now, what you have to do is, you have to siphon the wine-solution out of the primary fermentor (first bucket) into the secondary (jug). Johnny got this step set up and going too fast for me to take a picture, because he didn't want you-all to know that he was using his mouth to get the siphon going.

I said "So what? How else are you supposed to do it? And besides, I'm just going to tell them anyway."

And he said "Well, then make sure to tell them not to swallow what they suck up in there, or else they'll have the scutters for a week!"

Which sent me into a fit of such hysterics that it was half done siphoning before I managed to get this shot:

(Okay, maybe not quite half done, but still...)

Here is where gravity -- the real gravity, not the specific kind -- comes in handy: bucket on the counter, jug on the floor, both of them covered with white napkins so God can't see them eating baby birds.

Whoops.

Okay, now both of them covered with -- well, so, that's a wad of toilet paper, but it works. Really it's just to keep the fruit flies out until we put the lid on.

Which, ta da!

Now the wineless primary looks like this:

And if you thought the wine would give you scutters, boy howdy! You don't want to go anywhere near that scudge. The glass or two of plonk you might manage to salvage just ain't worth it. Trust me. Or trust Johnny, actually. I wouldn't know. Cuz I don't poop.

And that's it! Put the glass jug somewhere out of the way and try not to jostle it for the next couple of weeks. The airlock will bubble away and the cloudiness will settle out as the yeast eats up all the sugar it can find and farts and dies.

Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly what I do when I drink it!