Wine Recipes Cooking Beginners Top Tips

Clearing and Finishing

The aim now is to take the murky looking alcholic slosh and turn it into wine that follows these requirments.


  • The wine is crystal clear.
  • The wine is bottled and labeled.
  • The wine does not want to start fermenting in the bottle.
  • The wine is drinkable.

This is dead easy to achieve. It is a process of clearing and racking that has no real set pattern, the following is just a guide.

  • Kill the wine. Add 1 crushed campden tablet and a couple of teaspoons of wine stabliser. After 24 hours the last vestiges of fermentation will have ceased. The stabiliser will prevent further fermentation occouring.
  • Now add a couple of teaspoons of wine finings. After a week the gunk in the wine will have gone away.
  • Rack again.
  • Use your intelligance to employ the above to get a demijohn of clearish wine.
  • Taste. If the wine lacks acidity, add some more, if it is too acid add some chalk. This is not entirely nessesary, but it is fun.
  • I advise filtering at this point. Filters are cheap and very effective. Try visiting Boots.
  • Now siphon/pour the wine in some wine bottles. Cork the bottles with plastic or cork corks. if you use real corks I advise a corking machine. You are sopposed to get six bottles to the gallon. You won't.
  • Give the wine a label.
  • Now mature for two years. Ha. Thats what the book says! The wine is just about drinkable now. Left for a couple of months it will improve enormously. Six months to a year will have even more effect. It will not go off. The only way you are going to get mature winre is to make so much wine that it gets a decent chance to mature.

    Clearing is also aided by cold. Keeping wine made in the summer until cooler weather before worrying about the clarity of the homemade homebrew wine is a good idea. The cooler weather helps the wine clear.

    Wine also clears better when it has been de-gassed to remove as much dissolved carbon dioxide as possible - stir rapidly to release this gas.

    Sometimes pouring some clear wine into the job of the demi-john can help to carry the much down and clear the wine.>