To start the degassing step, we first transferred the wine from the carboy to the fermenter, then back to the sanitized carboy. The "real" way to do this is to just use a new carboy, but Burdell Cellars doesn't quite have that production capability yet. We got a new toy since last time, the auto-siphoner, so that we don't have to use the fish tank method anymore.
Here it is going back into the (sanitized) carboy. The foam is residue from the cleaning process. This particular cleaner is especially nice because you don't have to rinse out the cleaner--and risk re-contaminating the vessel--after you clean it.
This is what the wine looks like once the transfer finished. Notice all the bubbles! That's what we're trying to get rid of in this step. (Sparkling wine is a little above our capability at this point.) The spoon is inserted wrong-way-in because that's what we're using to stir; stirring vigorously promotes degassing. The degassing process, according to the kit, was to take anywhere between 10 minutes and 3 days, stirring every 10 minutes. That's an awfully big range, and an awfully demanding stirring requirement, but we pronounced it degassed after 2 days of intermittent stirring.
Next up was a few additives. Once the wine was sufficiently degassed, we added the remaining ingredients in the concentrate kit. First up was a clarifier...
...which Forrest is dissolving in water and adding to our carboy.
The final two additions were kieselsol and chitosan, two stabilizers sometimes referred to as "fining agents". These help to remove remaining particulates and sediment in the wine.
Last up was one more vigorous stir, to make sure we'd gotten all of our additives thoroughly mixed.
And here it is now. The amount of bubbling decreased dramatically after the degas/clarification process, which you can see. It's harder to see the consistency of the wine, but it's a lot clearer, resembling the appearance of a wine you'd actually drink on purpose.
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