Using the Proper Cork for Your Bottles -How to Make Homemade Wine

How to Make Homemade Wine with Quality Corks

Not enough has been said regarding how to make homemade wine that will turn out right by using the correct sort of cork to seal off the wine bottle. Genuinely, the type of cork you pick to seal your wine bottles is of crucial importance – it can make the difference between producing quality wine and slop.

Your local wine making store will probably offer you the “agglomerated” lot of cork for your wine bottles. Agglomerated cork is cork manufactured from smaller pieces of cork compressed together. It further happens to be the lowest quality of cork available for vintners to use.

If you long to use quality cork when learning how to make homemade wine, then do try to get cork that has been cut out of only one piece of cork bark rather than individual pieces glued together somehow. The cork that was cut out of the cork bark as one piece is the top quality cork that wineries use today.

Pricing for Cork Varieties

Your run-of-the-mill agglomerated cork will sell for around 20 US cents per part. The top-quality cork that wineries use cost about 75 US cents apiece. Though the agglomerated cork may sound to be a cheaper and superior preference for making homemade wine, the agglomerated cork tends to bring leakage of your valuable wine, leaving the wine inside the bottle contaminated by outside odors.

Why Quality Cork is Vital for How to Make Wine

Wineries use the top-quality cork to cut down on any spoilage of wine. At present, about 5% of wine produced by commercial wineries is lost by cork spoilage. This is identical to spoilage of one out of 20 bottles of wine. Cork spoilage is attributed to fungus that has tainted your wine bottle cork. The prevalence of tainted cork is the cardinal ground that wineries have switched to using the synthetic nature of cork or the screw-top assemblies instead to bottle wine. You might be surprised how many top-quality wine makers are using the metal screw-top assemblies rather than straight cork nowadays and it is all to avoid pricey spoilage of their homemade wine. Please read our article on bottling and aging wine and racking and clarification tips if you have not already done so.

The bark-based cork is currently being utilized now because it is the conventional way to seal off wine bottles, has been in use for centuries, and routinely looks superior to synthetic cork or metal screw-top assemblies. But there are distinct advantages to shifting to synthetic cork to seal off your wine bottles too.

The Advantages of Using Synthetic Cork

Synthetic cork is a viable preference if you want a good option to the button-down top-quality winery cork. There are sundry advantages to using synthetic cork.

One is that synthetic cork is cheap – you can buy a bulk amount of synthetic cork for 20 US cents each. This means it is as cheap as the agglomerated cork. But synthetic cork is superior to agglomerated cork because cork spoilage is avoided. You can relinquish doing those particular actions to limit cork spoilage like turning empty wine bottles upside down or letting them lie down.

There is no need to keep synthetic cork wet either to use them to bottle your wine. You can keep the synthetic cork upright instead of on its side and it will still be usable. Plus, synthetic corks are not affected by the humidity level of your storage organization like cork bark-based cork is. This allows you to buy synthetic cork in bulk quantities then store them for even a long time and they will still be useful for you.

The Disadvantage When Using Synthetic Cork When learning How to Make Wine

Though synthetic cork can be easier to use for wine bottling than conventional cork, their disadvantage is that they are difficult to use with hand held corkers for sealing your wine bottles. To seal the bottle properly with a synthetic cork, you have to have a floor corker around.

Difficulties Inherent With Use of Conventional Cork

Natural cork bark-based cork producers have also invested a lot into research and development as to the causes of cork spoilage and how they can make cork that will not cause wine spoilage – this has led wine spoilage attributed to bad cork to go down significantly. Frequently too, it is the winery that is at fault too because of the way they handle corks prior to stopping up the wine bottles, so wineries have to take care that corks are not contaminated prior to sealing off the wine.

One first problem in cork use is that you require a corkscrew or maybe a cork puller to remove the cork prior to drinking the wine. This could also be a problem with use of synthetic plastic corks. By using a corkscrew, you damage the cork generally beyond the point where it can be re-utilized. It is embarrassing for restaurant employees to have to sieve out bits and pieces of the cork that winds up in the wine liquid only so customers can drink it. It then becomes a problem for both staff and the patron as to how the leftover wine in the bottle can be stored – should it be thrown out after the wine bottle has been left open at the patron’s table for hours, or can a better preference for covering the bottle be created once the cork has been badly damaged?

To prevent damaging the cork during the sealing off stage (after the wine has been made and you need to seal it off for storage) you should use a floor corker – preferably the kind that uses an iris to insert the cork. This may be more costly than the particular lever, twin lever, and compression corkers about but the iris type floor corker is easier to use and is more rigorous for inserting the cork into the bottle. Hence, there is less potential injury to the cork, and less resulting damage to the wine inside.

Once corking is practiced, it is advisable to let your bottles stand upright for another 24 hours so that any extra compressed air in the wine bottle can leak out. If you store the bottle on a rack horizontally straightaway after corking, the compressed air from within may even push out the cork itself resulting in wine spilling out. After 24 hours, the wine bottle can be safely stored horizontally and this is even better because the wine touching the cork inside the bottle will prevent leaks by letting the cork remain moist.

If you have read this far you have learned there are several reasons why you can fail or produce wine of fair quality. To help avoid these issues, please read our article on Reasons for Failure.

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