Filtering Wine with the Buon Vino Mini Jet Filter

Making your own wine is a fantastic hobby. There's nothing as enjoyable as tasting a glass of delicious wine that you made yourself. One way you can up your winemaking game is by filtering. Hi, I'm Tim Vandergrift, your technical winemaking advisor. Today, we're going to talk about using a filter to improve the clarity of your wine. Filtering has a lot of issues around it. Number one, it's almost the last thing you should do to your wine before you bottle it. You've got to let the wine be almost completely clear before it goes through the filter. That's because filtering isn't designed to clear wine. Filtering is designed to polish. The best way to think of it is this. A perfectly fine wine that looks clear in the carboy is like a freshly washed car. Shiny, looks good, everyone's pleased. But a filtered wine is more like a freshly waxed car. You can tell the difference between washed and waxed right away, and waxed looks great. But you can't wax a dirty car. It has to be clean first. And the same goes for your wine. If it's cloudy and full of particles and suspension, your filter pads are going to plug up, and you're not going to have success. So filtering comes after finding when the wine is already completely clear. Now, there are people who are concerned that filtering can strip flavor or aroma or color. This isn't true. The kind of filter pads that are available to the home winemaker aren't tight enough to take out aroma, flavor, or color molecules. They simply can't. If you ever use a filter and look at the pads and see that there's a deposit either of a purplish or pinkish color from red wines, or an amber or beige color from whites, that's not color. Those are yeast cells and colloidal proteins that have been suspended in the wine that have absorbed color from it. You're taking them out. And they would normally settle out and form a deposit later on if you didn't filter. So filtering is good for wine, and it makes it look fabulous. Now, there's a bunch of different machines in the market that will filter your wine. All of them rely on depth filtration media. That is a type of filter pad. There are manual models and large, impressive high-speed models. But for most purposes, the Buon Vino Mini Jet Filter is going to accomplish the job quickly, easily, and with a minimum of fuss. Here's the mini jet out of the box. It consists of a small gear pump on this side, which picks the wine up to be filtered and pushes it through this hose into a set of plates. These plates are used to hold filter pads. The wine goes through them, the clouding material is trapped by the filter pad itself, and it comes out this eject port into the clean carboy. When you're filtering, one of the first choices you have to make is what type of pad you'll be using. Filter pads from Buon Vino come in three grades, 1, 2, and 3. 1 is the coarsest. It's intended for use in fruit wines and some other specialty applications. It's not suitable for use on kit wines. You'll almost never use it. The number 2 pad, however, is your workhorse. This pad is good for all red wines from kits and most of the whites. They'll go through easily, and they'll clear up beautifully. But today, we're doing something a little bit different. We're filtering an ice wine, and we want to get this filtered gorgeously clear for the glass. So I'm going to use number 3 pads. Number 3 pads are very fine. They will, in one pass, retain almost all of the free yeast cells, any colloidal material, and the wine will be sparkling bright in a single pass. Keep in mind that the efficiency of a filter pad is directly related to how much material it takes out. That is to say, the number 3 pads will polish the wine most brilliant. But if it's slightly cloudy, they'll plug up much quicker. Luckily, the wine that we've made is from a wine expert ice wine kit, and it's cleared absolutely beautifully. So the first step after we've chosen our pads is to clean the machine, sanitize it, and put the pads in and get it ready to go. As with all winemaking procedures, cleanliness is next to goodliness. So we're going to clean and sanitize our equipment before we use it. This has already been cleaned, so I just need to sanitize it with a solution of potassium metabisulfite. Your normal solution is 50 grams or 3 tablespoons of metabisulfite powder in 4 liters or 1 gallon of water. You can mix that up and store it tightly sealed for a couple of months for your use. My favorite trick is to take that solution and put it into a trigger spray bottle. This lets you apply it to complex surfaces and to things like a filter motor that you really can't dunk in a bucket full of sulfite solution. So I'm going to go ahead and spray everything down with sulfite, including the plates, the hoses, the connectors, everything that's going to come in contact with the wine. After you've sprayed down the plates and the interior of the machine, making sure to get the hoses that lead to and from the motor, you'll need to rinse that off quickly under the sink. The next step is to spray all of the hoses inside and out and then rinse them off. Finally, rinse off the plates and reinsert them into the machine. The plates can only go in in one direction. Make sure that the holes in the plates line up with the input and the output of the filter machine. Before the pads go into the machine, we need to dunk them in water. This will wet them and allow them to swell up slightly, so they'll seal tightly inside the plate and frame apparatus. Put them into a clean, sanitized bucket with some cool water or in a clean, sanitized sink. Just hold them under for a moment until they stop fizzing and bubbling. Pads go in with the coarse side, the dimpled rough side, facing towards the front of the machine where the motor is located. This is important. Filter pads only work in one direction. Once the pads are all inside, line them up with the plates and make sure that the pads are sticking out on all sides. This will ensure you don't get any leakage. When tightening the plates down, it's important to alternate between the two knobs. If you tighten it down all on one side, the plate and frame can get unbalanced and you'll have leaks. Tighten them firmly, but only hand tight. Never use a tool or you could break that handle off. So, tight with your hand, but don't go crazy on it. Once the machine is fully reassembled, reattach the input hose from the motor to the plate and frame, and then attach all of the other hoses. You're almost ready to go. This next step is crucial to the key of success in filtering. The filter pads have been wetted to swell them in the plates and frame, but we need to condition them just a little tiny bit more. The pads are made out of cellulose, and cellulose is just like cardboard fiber, so they've got a bit of dust on them from rubbing together inside the box. We're going to filter a gallon of water, which will rinse the dust off the pads and set them up so that the first line that comes out of the filter will be sparkling and bright as the last drop. I've got a gallon of cold, clean water inside this sanitized carboy, and I'm going to turn the machine on. You'll hear the sound of the motor, and it's pretty loud, but it's not unbearable. Watch. We want to put the whole gallon through. We've sanitized the filter. The pads have been soaked and inserted. The whole system has been flushed with a gallon of water, and we're ready to start filtering. We've got the pickup hose put into our three-gallon carboy full of ice wine, and it's not all the way to the bottom just yet. When I turn the machine on, it might jiggle the hose a little, so I'm going to leave it halfway down to begin with, and I'm also not putting the output hose into the carboy right away. The first flush that comes through will have some water in it, and I don't want that getting into my wine. I'm going to turn it on now, and after the wine starts to come out, I'm going to stop it, take the hose out of the sink, put it into my receiving carboy. You'll notice also there's a drip hose which catches any material coming out of the filter plates, anything that drips down and escapes the machine. That would normally go down the sink, but I don't like wasting anything, so I've got the drip hose going into a wine glass so I can catch a sample and taste it. Here we go. You can see the change in color there. We're ready to go. Into my receiving carboy. Put the hose down all the way to the bottom. You want to avoid splashing or aerating the wine if you can. Back on, and we're ready to filter. As it's filtering, I'm going to move the pickup hose down into the wine to make sure we pick up every drop. Be sure you've got the anti-sediment tip on the pickup hose to avoid disturbing the sediment bed, which would block the filters up pretty quickly. While the machine is running, about halfway through the filter pass, I'm going to pull the hose up and take a sample. I removed a sample from it pre-filtering. We're going to compare these and just see what the difference is. Here are the examples of the wine, both pre- and post-filtering. It's difficult to convey on video the difference between the two, but to the naked eye, when you look at them, the unfiltered wine is fine. It's substantially clear. It's got a nice color. The filtered wine, on the other hand, sparkles to the eye. It's what is technically known as diamond bright. It even has a slightly more refined aroma. That's because all of the yeast cells, colloidal proteins, and other things that are floating around in it are gone. This is an improvement. This wine, no matter how long we store it in the bottle, is not going to throw a sediment or leave anything on the inside of the bottle to see. It looks great. And that only took a couple of minutes of our time. The final step, break the filter down, clean it, safely discard the pads, because if you leave them lying around in the garbage, you'll have fruit flies right away. Clean the rest of your equipment, and you're done for the day. That's it. I'm Tim Vandergrift, your technical winemaking advisor. Enjoy your wine.