Maybe you sold your house, maybe you decided to rent a different apartment, but for whatever reason you’re moving. How do you transport your carboys and jugs without breaking them or spilling anything? I was in exactly that situation and I managed to get my fermenting and aging wine from the old house to the new house without incident. Here’s how I did it:

Bottle it!

By far the best way is to bottle your wine or mead, pack it well, and ship it. I was able to bottle some of my wine by moving day and I just turned that over to the movers. Most of it was in commercial wine boxes with cardboard dividers, but some of it was in ordinary moving boxes with each bottle wrapped in newspaper. However you do it, make sure the bottles are packed to they don’t move and that glass doesn’t touch glass.

Move the jugs in a cooler

I had quite a bit of aging/fermenting wine, and not a lot of free time. So by moving day I had a lot of 1-gallon jugs with airlocks that I needed to move. As with the bottles, packing the jugs so that glass does not touch glass and they don’t move will prevent breakage. But there will be bumps and there will be sloshing. That could lead to spilling and popped airlocks. One way to handle this would be to replace the airlocks with solid bungs and tape them into place, but even if you do this (I didn’t) you should still plan for spills.

I did this by packing the 1-gallon jugs into a large (37.5 gallon – 142 liter) cooler. It held all of my jugs, with airlocks, and I was still able to close the lid. Now the jugs were prevented from moving, protected from impact, and enclosed in a watertight cooler. The cooler went in the back of my SUV, and the jugs made the trip without breaks or leaks.

Use nested garbage bags to contain spills from a carboy

I had one carboy to move and no waterproof container to put it in, so I turned to large plastic garbage bags. I place the carboy into one bag, let’s call it the “bottom bag.” The other bag, cleverly named “top bag,” draped over the carboy. I tucked the top bag inside the bottom bag, then pulled the bottom bag up to enclose the carboy. Once I fastened the bottom bag in place with tape, even a violent spill would be contained.

The waterproofed carboy joined the large cooler in the back of my SUV, where I nestled it between boxes, towels, old clothes and whatever else was handy. After I was satisfied that it was well padded and immobile, I headed for my new home. Like the 1-gallon jugs, the carboy, and – more importantly – the blueberry mead inside it, arrived in fine shape.

There might be better ways of doing it, and I’d love to hear about them, but this is how I did it and it worked. Remember: immobilize, protect, and waterproof. It’s worth the effort so you can – and you really should – pop open some home made wine when you get to your new place!

The wine has fermented out, been racked, and is patiently aging in the basement. The winemaker, on the other hand, is not so patient. It isn’t brilliantly clear, but its flavor and aroma he’s interested in, so he bottles. The trouble with this approach is that a wine that isn’t clear has something in suspension, and it’s not going to stop settling just because a cork went into the bottle and a nice label got glued to the side.

What happens when you bottle too soon?

What sorts of things might settle out? It might be something harmless, like cream of tartar. It might be fruit solids. In the case of my 2006 Apple Wine it was yeast. I rushed it into bottles in December 2006, just two months after fermentation began. It was still and dry when I bottled, so there was never a question of fermentation pressurizing the bottles. But yeast went dormant in the bottles, settled out, and began to decay.

Good looking wine: More than just a pretty face

That doesn’t make for good flavor, which is why the bottle I opened last night failed to deliver on the promise I saw in it early on. I usually work to make clear wine because I appreciate how it looks in the glass, but I learned last night that lack of clarity can be more than an aesthetic problem.

More and more wine is bottled with synthetic cork or twist off caps. Many people associate these modern enclosures with cheap wine and that makes wineries reluctant to switch. It’s a shame, really, because we’ve learned so much since natural cork was state of the art. We’ve learned that 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), a substance that occurs in natural cork, causes a wine fault called “cork taint.” We’ve learned to make synthetic cork, which is free of such taint but can leave wine vulnerable to oxidation after several years. Finally, we’ve learned to make twist off caps that will allow a tiny, consistent amount of oxygen into the wine – enough for it to age properly, but not enough to oxidize it. After learning all that, twist off caps don’t look cheap to me; they look like really good modern closures that keep our wine in top condition.