Mastering the Wine Thief: Essential for Home Winemakers

What Is a Wine Thief?

A wine thief is a tube shaped tool that you can dip into your carboy, primary fermenter, or barrel and extract a small amount of your developing wine carboy.

Wine Thief Styles

There are typically 2 styles for the home winemaker.

• The first style is a small glass tube approximately 12 inches long. This is a nice size for 1 gallon containers and to take a tasting sample. Due to its low volume capacity, it will require several dips if you are trying to fill a test jar with it.
• The second style is typically 24 inches in length and made of food grade plastic. It has an opening on the top for easy testing access, and a valve at the bottom that stops the flow of wine as it is removed from the fermenter. The flow is restarted when the valve is depressed into a container.

Both styles are inexpensive ($6-$12 USD) and work well.

Test Your Wine, or have a Taste

Wine making requires a variety of tests to ensure that your finished product is exactly what you hoped for.

Each of the following test efforts will require a bit of your wine to be drawn from the batch:

·                Monitoring specific gravity readings during  fermentation

·                Testing Acid and pH levels

·                Checking sulphite concentrations

·                Tasting your wine

Pouring wine directly from a carboy or primary fermenter into a test jar can be messy and cumbersome. With a 6-gallon carboy, tilting to pour is nearly out of the question.

Having a wine thief and test jar available will make your testing easier and less time consuming.

Using Your Wine Thief

Using your wine thief is a very simple process:

Step 1: Clean and sanitize your wine thief. As always, it's very important to clean anything that will touch your wine

Step 2: Insert the wine thief into your wine container, allowing it to fill, and then carefully withdraw it.

Step 3: Dispense the sample into a test jar for your tests.

Step 4: If the wine is still good, return it to the batch.

Do Home Wine Makers Really Need One?

While optional, a wine thief significantly simplifies testing and tasting. It's included in our Deluxe Home Mead, Cider, or Wine Equipment Kit for a reason—it's invaluable for accurate hydrometer readings and sampling your wine.

It will serve you well in your testing efforts by making your job a whole lot easier, and most importantly allowing you a taste of your wine every now and again!