topping up on racking

[safronsue]

can someone clarify please. what should you use?

 

[Yooper]

Ideally, you'd top up with a similar wine. But a commercial wine is fine, too. Some of my recipes allow for water to top up, while some of my recipes make more wine and I keep a small growler of wine next to the fermenter just for topping up after racking.

 

[modF]

Ideally, you'd top up with a similar wine. But a commercial wine is fine, too. Some of my recipes allow for water to top up, while some of my recipes make more wine and I keep a small growler of wine next to the fermenter just for topping up after racking.

How do you decide if you are going to use wine or water for topping up? I just bottled about 4.5 gallons last night that I think had too much head space, well either that or I should have oaked it to death.. Overall, I'm not quite as happy with it after it sat for a year.

 

[Noe]

If you don't want to use wine or water you can use glass marbles to displace the volume lost when racking. For larger batches you may need quite a bit of marbles but you can always reuse them in later batches.