Finishing Your Wine

Bottling, Corking and Labelling
Here you are making your wine presentable - remember we eat and drink with our eyes first, your wine needs to look good.

Bottles
Standard wine bottles comes with two different openings, 18.5mm will require a #9 cork, the narrower necked bottles will need a #8 cork, as will 375ml split bottles.
Ice Wine Bottles can have a smaller neck opening and require a #8 cork.

Tech tip! Always inspect your bottles to ensure they are clean. A good wine in a bad bottle will go off. If there is mould, stains or bugs toss it!
Also, screw top bottles have thin necks prone to breakage and there not enough surface area on the length of the cork to create a good closure – not recommended.

Corks
There are different types of corks offered to suit your different needs:

Agglomerated
• Made from chipped cork pieces ground to a specific size and glued together with a non-reactive polyurethane glue
• Inexpensive
• Easy to handle
• Suitable for wines that will be held for 6 months, or at most, less than 1 year

Synthetic
• Made from inert synthetic resins
• Eliminates risk of cork taint
• Bottles can be stored standing upright
• Great long-term corks for wines aging up to 3 years
• Not recommended for use with a floor corker, a crease along the closure allowing wine and air leaking

Reference
• natural cork is micro-fragmented, leaving pure cork flour is blended with a very small percentage of polymer
• a nearly 100% natural cork, perfect in shape and without defect or pores, superior in appearance and sealing quality
• far lower TCA levels than other corks
• Great long-term corks for wines aging up to 3 years


Natural Corks
• Punched from natural cork bark
• Has higher chance of TCA contamination and “corked” wine
• An environmentally friendly choice as cork is renewable
• More prone to leaking

Cork Selection
Selecting the right cork for your needs requires thinking about time and quality. Basically, you get what you pay for. When choosing a cork, consider the following:

Storage Length
Look realistically at how long you expect to store your wine before drinking. To keep some bottles for the future, you may find yourself having to re-cork them in a few years. For bottles which are to be opened within the next 6 months, a long, expensive cork might be a waste of money.

Cork Length
Burgundy bottles with the sloping neck should have a 1½” cork, Bordeaux straight necked bottles a 1¾” cork.

Tech Tip! While in past cork soaking or boiling was recommended - it is no longer. It can break down the cork fibres and introduce bacteria that will ruin your wine.