Bubbly wine

I opened a bottle of my plum wine. It is only four months old. It is bubbly and tastes like champagne. Wondering how it got that way?

There were still sugars left when you bottled. Did you take any readings? Also I suggest maybe drinking the rest quickly so they don't explode on you.

Did not take readings but was real dry when I bottled it. Some I sweetened and stabilized but did not think I needed to do it on this. This is my first time to make and bottle wine. Learning a lot from this forum.

RedGapBrew said:

Did not take readings but was real dry when I bottled it. Some I sweetened and stabilized but did not think I needed to do it on this. This is my first time to make and bottle wine. Learning a lot from this forum.

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There are only two possiblities- either there were fermentable sugars in the wine, or it was gassy when bottled (or both, I guess).

If the wine was completely dry, .990, and bottled, then it had to have been gassy. If it was higher than .990, there were still fermentable sugars in it.

Did you de-gas it well before bottling?

100 bucks on not degassed

I would say not degassed. How do you do that? Somehow I missed that part of my instructions, only my dry wine is that way. Not the sweet.

you need to either manually wip the wine like a blender or use a power drill with a paint stirrer(those are the ol fashion ways) and you need to do this for like a half hour depending on how bad it needs degassed. I do this at bottling time after adding K meta and ascorbic acid

Honda88 said:

you need to either manually wip the wine like a blender or use a power drill with a paint stirrer(those are the ol fashion ways) and you need to do this for like a half hour depending on how bad it needs degassed. I do this at bottling time after adding K meta and ascorbic acid

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If using a power drill, small controlled bursts, it will foam over if you do it to hard and don't have a lot of head space. I did that today actually, got impatient.

If the wine was sweetened at bottling, though, that IS the cause and not degassing. Most wines and ciders will degas enough naturally, as I've only actually had ONE wine in 15 years that needed degassing besides kit wines.

This thread peaked my curiosity because I have wondered recently about commercial sweet white and pink wines that have a tiny bit of effervescence when opened. It generally seems like a good thing to me. I wondered how that could be accomplished at home.

The plum wine could have gone thru a MLF, though if you stabilized both dry and sweet versions that would be unlikely.

You said only the dry version of finished wine is sparkling? Was that stabilized with k-meta plus sorbate?