Tiny bottles in wine making

nappy501

I have recently returned to winemaking after about three decades.

As it is just me now, I had a go at a micro batch.  I was given some homegrown grapes, which I fermented in a bowl, then a two litre milk container.  I have racked it off into a one litre plastic drinks bottle and a pickle jar with pickle pipe.

So basically I will have just over a bottle of wine.  However, I have been saving those small wine bottles from the supermarket.  They hold 187mls and I have one 250 mls.  They are screw capped.  Hopefully, they won't be around long enough for the screwcaps to be an issue.  It also means I can gift the person who gave me the grapes a bottle and not feel like I had to give it all away.

My question is how long can I keep these screw capped bottles of wine?  I was thinking 6 to 12 months.  Does anyone else make really tiny brews?

I have also started some mead with 340g honey and there is a litre of that.

So I would really like to hear from anyone else who makes tiny micro brews.  What do you rack into? 

Katiehound

As long as the bottles (& lids) are sterilised and you don't store the bottles on their side I would think they should keep well over 12 months. I used to keep home made wine a lot longer than that but they had corks.

For a good source of free bottles see if you can find somewhere that sells non alcoholic drinks such as Fentimans which come in good strong glass bottles with a screw lid. My local garden centre has a cafe & they get oodles of these bottles which I assume are recycled. My contact got a free full bottle of cordial! Maybe a local pub gets small screw top bottles?

I like to use small bottles for drinks like elder flower cordial, blackberry liqueur etc so that I can give some (but not all!) of the brew away.