Topping up advice, anyone use marbles?

[bgd]

I'm nearly 4 weeks into my first attempt at a homemade wine, I have 2 demijohns of blackberry wine on the go, OG was 1.1, SG currently around 0.996, currently bubbling about once a minute so slowing down nicely, so far so good.

A couple of days ago I racked both the demi johns for the first time as there was a decent amount of sediment at the bottom of each, given this was my first go, as you can imagine it wasnt perfect, I didnt pick up any sediment but I also threw away more than I probably should have and now have both demijohns with reasonable gaps at the top.

My understanding is that at the minute I'm ok as they are still fermenting so the CO2 will sit on the surface protecting it from that horrible oxygen stuff but once it's finished and I want to rack again, stabilise, degass and add any finings i'll be opening it up to potential problems before bottling.

I'm not going to rule anything out but i'm not keen on topping up with either water or shop bought wine. One option might be to make sure one demi john is full and find a smaller container for the rest.

In future I'm thinking of making an additional 2L or so and filling, say 3 wine bottles with bubblers and then topping up the demijohns with one of these each time I rack.

I read a suggestion of using sterilised glass marbles to reduce the space, does anyone do this? seems a good idea to me (although by my calculation to take up half a litre would require 300 14mm marbles).

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Top up with water the amount you add will have little effect on taste or ABV.

 

[An Ankoù]

Have the blackberries finished? If not you could pick some more to make your top up. Otherwise water, or, as you've calculated the ullage to be half a litre each, add water plus one tenth of the original amount of sugar you added to each demijohns.

 

[DocAnna]

I've used inert glass beads to fill up the space for a mead which had much more space left after a first racking due to it having had fruit in it initially. I used these since they can be heat sterilised in the oven to ensure completely sterile. The vastly increased surface area of marbles or beads is a significant infection risk so I'm not convinced standard sanitation measures would be enough for glass marbles - though I guess immersion soaking for a few hours would probably be ok, rinsing them thoroughly would also be an issue.
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Anna

 

[bgd]

Thanks all, makes sense about the surface area of the marbles being a much bigger risk.

I like the idea of just adding more blackberry juice, they havent finished fermenting yet but slowing right down, I'm guessing strain some juice, bring to boil, cool, tiny bit of pecotlase and campen tablet over night before adding?

Should I add now, or wait until what i have is finished and stabilised? i guess the latter is basically sweetening?

 

[DocAnna]

If you are boiling the juice then a campden tab/powder shouldn't be required, either that or hold at low pasteurisation temp (63 C) for a half hour which would avoid losing as much of the aroma from the juice.

Anna