Wine Bottle Rinsing & Sparging

Making sure your bottles are prepped correctly is an important part of the bottling process and MoreWine!'s bottle rinsing and sparging equipment will help you do that. The center piece for any bottling set-up will be the bottling tree. The tree has a series of upward-angled posts that fit into the neck of a bottle. When the bottle is inserted onto the post it's held at a downward angle. This allows any excess liquid from washing or sanitizing the bottles to drain out completely (the bottling tree's base also acts as a reservoir). Another benefit to having the bottles facing downward is that once they have been sanitized and are waiting to be filled, air-born contaminants are no longer able to fall into the bottles and re-contaminate them as they are waiting to be filled.

We recommend the following process to prep your bottles for bottling:

• Make sure the bottles are completely clean. If you are reusing bottles, make sure any residual deposits/particulates have been removed (a simple bottle brush is invaluable!)
• Sanitize the bottles before filling. We recommend using the Sanitizer Injector add-on. The injector holds a small portion of sanitizer and is designed to sit on top of the bottle tree. Insert a bottle onto the spring-activated post and as you push down sanitizer gets squirted up into the bottle. This simple unit acts as both a bottle rinser and a bottle sanitizer at the same time!
• As an additional protection, you may want to sparge the bottle with inert gas before filling it. The better you can minimize the amount of oxygen contact the wine will see, the better you will be able to preserve the freshness and vibrancy of the wine. This applies not only to whites and roses, but to reds as well!