05/04/2026
This is what happens between the day you order your kit and the day you walk out with thirty bottles of wine.
Most customers never see it. They order, they come back 4 weeks later, and the wine is ready. What happened in between — the chemistry, the process, the precision — is invisible to them by design.
Jess is checking specific gravity with a calibrated hydrometer. The reading tells us exactly where fermentation is: whether the yeast has consumed the sugars, whether we've hit the target SG, whether it's time to rack to secondary. We're looking for 0.992 to 0.988 for a dry wine — the number that tells us the fermentation is complete and the wine is clean.
When the number is right, you rack. You transfer the must from the primary fermentation vessel — carefully, without disturbing the sediment — into a secondary glass carboy. That's what you're watching in the syphon shot. Still slightly hazy, full of potential.
Then it clears. The wine drops bright — the sediment settles, the tannins bind, the colour deepens. By the time you come in to bottle, those carboys are crystal. The wine is ready.
The whole process runs at a constant 72°F in the fermentation room. Every batch is tracked. Every reading is recorded. You never see any of this — but you taste it.
