Filtering Your Wine

Many of you have been making awesome kit wines and wishing to expand your wine-making experience, have ventured into making wines from locally available fresh fruit. This spring, Sid, my Dad and I made our first batch of strawberry wine from fresh strawberries. It turned out to be pretty easy and the aroma was outstanding! So, of course, we made a second 5 gallon batch!









Sid makes great wines and has been filtering his wines for some time now. I have read several articles on the subject and they seem to feel filtering makes a difference on your finished wine. We have two batches of white wines made from the Cellar Classic kits and a Mead that we made from Orange Blossom honey that are almost ready for bottling. This weekend I brought a wine filter and some filter pads home. Honestly, I thought it would be messy and not really make much difference on my finished wine.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that when I started filtering, I was able to quickly fix any leaks by adjusting the filter clamps. As the wine flowed, it went from a deep golden color to a bright gold color! We filtered 12 gallons of the Cellar Classic kit wines and 5 gallons of Mead. I was again pleasantly surprised to see how much yeast and other "stuff" was removed from the wine!

Getting setup with filtering will run around $100. This addition to your wine-making process and adds around 30-45 minutes to your pre-bottling activities. Several of the articles I have read report that filtering your wine does not affect the flavor or body. If you occasionally find a slight dusting of particles in your bottles, I think filtering will help take care of that.

I dried out the two filters I used and have them at the shop for you to see. We also have a filter on display, so stop by today and check them out. By the way, the picture above DOES look like a pumpkin pie, but it is the used filter from 17 gallons of white wine.