This is probably ok, but...

...Put my mind at ease?

About 9-10 weeks ago, my wife and I did our first wine. It was supposed to be a wedding present for her sister. (FWIW, it was a kit wine, Vintners Reserve - Australian Reserve) (Was supposed to be bottled 4-6 weeks after the kit was started and we started it August 29)

Well, work had me seriously slammed the week we were supposed to bottle, then came the wedding that next weekend, back to work where I was slammed again (I just couldn't make the time to bottle), then my mom died unexpectedly ( )

So here we are, 4 weeks later then we should have bottled..

Am I good or did the delay put the wine in jeopardy?

Actually, you did a good thing! Even though the instructions tell you to bottle at the 4 week mark, it's better to bulk age a bit. If you have lees, you'll have to rack off of them to bottle anyway, so it's fine.

Did you do all the steps? The clarifying, degassing and topping up? If you did, you're all set.

Time is your friend. Four week wine is drinkable. Barely. At four months it will be much better and at fourteen months it will bear no resemblenace to what was in the carboy the day you bottled it. That is waht gets everyone hooked on making wine. You make some an drink it and it's ok, then after some time you see how much better it gets. So you start making more. And more. Before you know it you are buying grapes by the ton, but you still go to the farmers market to buy fruit to make quick county wines, so you have something to drink while waiting for the 'real' stuff to be ready.

You will be just fine. That is the minimum time frame. I just bottled a batch last week that I could of bottled 2 years ago. The only thing you don't want to do is leave the wine sitting on gross lees too long but even then a month or so won't hurt you.

YooperBrew said:

Actually, you did a good thing! Even though the instructions tell you to bottle at the 4 week mark, it's better to bulk age a bit. If you have lees, you'll have to rack off of them to bottle anyway, so it's fine.

Did you do all the steps? The clarifying, degassing and topping up? If you did, you're all set.

Click to expand...

I thought that we were good, but like I said, I needed to just put my mind at ease.

Yes, we did all the steps. The next thing we were supposed to do was bottle, so we'll do that next!

I did notice that it clarified alot more with the extra time!