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).
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).