Using a Wine Making Kit, Part Two
Secondary Fermentation
Once your wine has reached the desired specific gravity from the primary fermentation process (read the instructions that came with your wine making kit to find it), it’s time to put the wine into the carboy for the second fermentation.
Before you start the process of taking the wine from the bucket to your carboy (this process is called racking), make sure to sanitize, disinfect and rinse everything that you’ll be using today. That includes the carboy, racking cane, any and all tubing, the bung, and the air lock. Once again, take your time and make sure to be thorough.
Once you’re ready to begin, it’s important to know a couple of things about the racking process. The yeast, grape particles and various other particles that we don’t want in our wine have settled at the bottom of the fermentation bucket. (This stuff is collectively called the sediment, or lees.) If you slosh the wine around while it’s in the bucket, that will disturb the sediment and cause it to mix back in with the wine. This would be bad. We want the sediment to stay at the bottom of the bucket so we can siphon out the wine as cleanly as possible.
A quick note on siphoning the wine: Having the bucket in a higher spot than the carboy will help the process immensely. If you need to lift the bucket to a table, take care to be gentle so as not to disturb the sediment, as I just mentioned above.
Once the bucket, carboy and tubing are in place, you can start siphoning the wine into the carboy. Once all of the wine is transferred, put the bung and air lock in place to close the carboy, and discard all of the sediment remaining in the bucket. At this point, it could be helpful to put the carboy up in an elevated spot, as we’ll be racking the wine back out into the fermenting bucket in about a week. There will be some sediment build-up at the bottom of the carboy – although not as much as from the first fermentation – so we’ll want to move the carboy around as little as possible once the wine has begun to ferment again.
You’ll need to break out your hydrometer in about a week to take another reading. Most wines will be ready for the next step at this point, but some will require a bit more time. Refer to the specific instructions from your wine making kit. Be patient – your wine is about halfway done!