Saturday, August 21, 2010

Stainless steel storage container

We racked the white wine again in July. We had two barrels originally of white. After disposing of the lees, the remainder almost fitted into one barrel except for about 40 litres or so. Not sure what to do with this at first, I remembered the wine storage container I was given as a gift a couple of years ago. I went off to get it and cleaned it quickly. It stores 30 litres and the rest we put in some plastic containers.

The storage tank came with a bottle of paraffin which I had been told should be poured on top of the wine to preserve it.  Now, the idea of pouring paraffin on top of my nice wine was pretty scary, so I didn't do it.  Afterwards I got in touch with a distributor in Australia who confirmed how to use it, so will do that next time I'm at the cellar. This picture doesn't show that top of the wine is a floating lid, around which there is about a half mm of space where the paraffin should go, and then the main lid is placed on top.

This stainless steel storage container was manufactured in Slovakia. When I searched for such containers on the internet I found very very few links, and interestingly one of them was in English from a distributor in Hungary. My guess is that for home winemaking these are not widely used, although (larger) stainless steel containers are commonplace in commercial production today.

I'm looking forward to tasting this wine now it's been in the container for a couple of weeks (without paraffin on top) to see whether or not it has gone off. Hopefully not, although as the white is a bit acidic in the first place I won't lose sleep in case it is.

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