When you're wine shopping, pick up a few 1.5L bottles of wine, or sometimes you can find "jug wine" in intermediate sizes between 1.5L and 5 gallons. Those make nice containers for "topping off" wine.
ACID BLEND QUESTIONAs another poster mentioned, acid blend on its own won't balance bitterness. You might want to taste the wine again to make sure...
If you're working with red grapes, here's what I often do. Buy enough juice or grapes to make 6 gallons of wine. When you do the press, fill a 5 gallon carboy with the free-run wine and any press wine needed to make up the 5 gallons. Then, fill the 1 gallon carboy (wine jug) separately with the press wine. Fit both with an airlock and allow both to separately go through the secondary fermentation.
When you rack at the end of the secondary fermentation, top off with the press wine, and then rack the rest of the press wine into smaller containers (1 or more 1.5L wine bottles, for example). For remaining rackings, top off the 5 gallon carboy from the smaller containers of the press wine, and then either top off the smaller containers with distilled water or just discard the remaining press wine (and by discard, that could mean drink it of course to blend it back in with the free-run wine.
The easiest option, as already mentioned, is to just top off with a bottle of a similar wine (maybe from last year's winemaking).
Finally, you can sterilize some marbles, and add those to the carboy until the level of the wine reaches well up into the neck of the carboy (that's what you want to aim for to avoid excessive oxidation of the wine). Each time you rack, though, you'll need more marbles. You can sterilize the marbles by boiling them in water for 5 minutes.
Jon Check out my winemaking homepage
