Dandelion Wine: Part 4

The wine was summer caught and stoppered. ... Since this was going to be a summer of unguessed wonders, he wanted it all salvaged and labeled so that any time he wished, he might tiptoe down in this dank twilight and reach up his fingertips. And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. 

~from Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury

Our dandelion wine seems to be done fermenting, so we removed the balloons and the cotton and sealed up the bottles. We went with these bottlecap corks:

They are pretty easy to use, and you can twist them off and re-use them if you don't finish the bottle of wine on the first go. We liked that they didn't require any special equipment to use — you may recall that this is the world's cheapest wine-making experiment. 

This took no time at all, since all all we did was pop in the cork caps. I supposed we could have racked the wine into clean bottles again to try to get rid of some of the leftover sediment, but the only tubing around the house is for the fish tank, so it's pretty gross. If you look closely, you can see the sediment at the bottom:

But we're ok with that — we'll just pour it carefully. And if we're feeling fancy, we'll pour our wine through a napkin, Carson-style.

Now the bottles are on a shelf in the basement, where they will be cool and out of the light to age for the next six months. Before we put it away, we did take a quick sip to taste it, though. It was better than before, but still pretty strong. It's not as fumey as it was, but it definitely warms you up from the inside out. We'll see if it continues to mellow over the summer and fall until we give it an official tasting on the first day of winter.