Sparkling wine advice needed

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Nobbynormal

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Hello, I have a wilko medium dry white wine kit That I intend to split after adding finings and make half into sparkling wine.

I intend to bottle with priming sugar into used sparkling bottles with plastic stoppers and cages and leave them for as long as I can stand it.

I also read that I should add more yeast to each bottle?

Any advice on what I am doing right or wrong, best sugar to use and timing of when to bottle would be much appreciated.

The wine is still fermenting quite fast after 1 week and I have some Gervin universal wine yeast if needed.

Thanks for any help you can offer.
 
Only use bottles that are fully capable of taking the pressure generated by a sparkling wine!

There's absolutely no need to add more yeast if you are just clearing the fermented wine with finings because there will be enough yeast remaining in the finished wine to start secondary fermentation in the bottle.

You can use table sugar for priming.

I would use the Calculator at the top of this page to decide how "gassy" I need my wine to be and add the recommended amount of sugar. (The calculator is for beer but by using the recommended amounts you will hopefully avoid any "bottle bombs"!)

To prevent the "sparkle" lifting yeast into the wine when the bottle is opened I recommend that you carbonate the wine stood upright and in the dark so that the produced yeast settles to the bottom of the bottle. If you then wait a good long time (six months is not too long) the yeast will compact and stay at the bottom of the bottle when it is opened and poured. (Keeping the wine in the dark will stop the yeast sticking to the sides of the bottle instead of settling to the bottom.)

An alternative to standing the bottles upright is to use screw-capped bottles, carbonate them standing upside down so that the yeast settles on the cap, do a quick "open/shut" of the cap to blow the bulk of the yeast out of the bottle and then store in the upright position. I have never used this system so I don't know how effective it is!

Hope this helps. :thumb:
 
Thanks Dutto, this is all very helpful! My bottles are ex cava and prosecco and I got the stoppers from Homebrew online shop. I looked at the calculator but sparkling wine is more fizzy than beer, I was thinking of batch priming with an average of 1 tea spoon of sugar per 75 Cl bottle.
 
Nobbynormal said:
Thanks Dutto, this is all very helpful! My bottles are ex cava and prosecco and I got the stoppers from Homebrew online shop. I looked at the calculator but sparkling wine is more fizzy than beer, I was thinking of batch priming with an average of 1 tea spoon of sugar per 75 Cl bottle.
Click to expand...

That sounds okay. :thumb:

Please remember that, unlike a shop-bought bottle of sparkling wine, a home-brewed bottle will always have some yeast sediment at the bottom.

So, you can pour the wine from a shop-bought bottle in as many portions as you like without fear of pouring out any yeast, but with home-brewed sparkling wine:

a) You don't want the wine so fizzy that uncorking the bottle results in the yeast lifting from the bottom of the bottle and clouding up the wine as soon as it is opened.

b) It helps to control the movement of the yeast if you can open a bottle and then pour all the contents out in one smooth movement from when the bottle is upright to when the yeast starts to appear at the mouth of the bottle.
(Not a problem for SWMBO and I as we have two glasses that hold just under half a bottle each!) :drunk:

In the case of still red wines it is usually beneficial to decant them from the bottle before use.

Decanting is also worth considering for chilled white wines as even sparkling wines will retain their bubbles if they are adequately chilled before being opened and decanted.

Good luck with the project. :thumb:
 
My sparkling wine has been in bottles for about a month now and although I can't see what's going on inside, I did put some in a couple of 500ml plastic bottles so I can gauge how the carbonation is going.
After a month they are quite firm but nowhere near as hard as they should be when finished.
I just wonder if they will continue to carbonate.
 
Nobbynormal said:
My sparkling wine has been in bottles for about a month now and although I can't see what's going on inside, I did put some in a couple of 500ml plastic bottles so I can gauge how the carbonation is going.
After a month they are quite firm but nowhere near as hard as they should be when finished.
I just wonder if they will continue to carbonate.
Click to expand...
If as you said earlier you only primed with a teaspoon then they're not going to be rock hard, basically just beer kind of pressurisation and I'd imagine a month would be plenty to finish off the fermentation. I use about 5 times that amount in PET bottles and they end up like bricks.
 
I didn't use stabiliser but may have been a bit too light with the priming sugar as I didn't want any bottle bombs. However it turns out you know it won't be wasted :-?
 

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