Kegging Moscato?

I have recently gotten into homebrewing my on beers and kegging! I recently purchased a kegerator with dual tap handles with the intention on kegging two varieties of liquid (his and hers if you will). My idea was to keg or brew my wife (a moscato wine lover) a batch of moscato or a nice desert wine and then keg it to force carbonate it (like a moscato de asti). My question is if anyone has ever tried to just purchase wine from your local store, open it, poor it in a cornie keg, and force carbonate it? It seems like it'd be a much simpler process if it works and we'd produce the exact same product each time (store bought moscato turned into a homebrew moscato de asti). Thanks for your feedback!

Matt

Why not make your own and keg it after back sweetening? A sweet white wine kit is probably ready to drink in 2-4 months. There are several sweet wine kits including the Island Mist kits which make a light bodied fruit flavored wine. These might be good choices for carbonating and will be less expensive than buying bottles.

You can dump bottles or use wine in a box into a keg, however you should try to minimize the exposure to O2 during the process. Purge the keg before and after filling it with CO2 and try to pour the wine from a low height perhaps with the keg at an angle to minimize splashing. You may want to only due a few bottles at a time until you are sure they do not go off from oixdation. And till you are sure a sparkling sweet wine is what you want.

Craig

My SWMBO also loves the Moscato d'Asti, however I agree with the Baron, buying bottles will be quite expensive. Perhaps take his advice and try it with just two or three bottles first. Then for sure buy a kit or the ingredients needed and brew your own. It is much cheaper to do that. There are several companies offering moscato kits if you google, though I haven't tried them yet. I have also been told that some sam's clubs sell pure moscato grape juice, which would be perfect for this situation.

Thanks for the thoughts and comments! I've done the google searching for moscato wine kits and really only came up with two different kits but I can't figure out what distributor sells them. It's as if I am looking at a distributors only list of products that the average joe can't purchase. The other issue I am finding is that a lot of the desert wine kits cost around +$100 and make only 3 gallons of wine. With the store bought bottle to keg idea, I'd have the same amount of money invested but with 5 gallons of wine. Eitherway, if you find a link to a moscato kit that can be purchased, please let me know. Otherwise, thanks for the advice and I'll continue looking for a much cheaper desert wine that I can experiment with and make it sparkling.

Thanks again!

You could look at Alexander's Concentrates : NORTHERN BREWER: Wine Ingredients

Seems like they are reasonably priced, however I have never tried them.

Steve

Or what about this link

Wine Kits Plus .com - Winemaking supplies, kits and equipment.: Mosto Italiano

Scroll down to moscato. $67.97 US

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that responded to my initial post and give an update. I ended up purchasing the moscato grape juice from Northern Brewer (from the link above from phred 02) and used Wyeast rudesheimer #4783. With the use of simple syrup I bumped the Original Gravity (I'm a beer guy) up to nearly 1.10 and added the yeast, and 1 SO2 tablet and let it ferment for about 3 weeks I think. At that time the Specifif gravit was around 1.03 which gave me a very nicely sweetened wine with about 9% alcohol. I then kegged and carbonated it like I do with my homebrew beers and it turned out fantastic! My wife, with my help of course, has nearly pollished off the first keg. The only problem I recognized is that I just found out the keg is nearly dry and I haven't started a new batch of wine yet! Thanks again to everyone!

Also, the way I made the wine was about the least expensive with my total being somewhere around +/- $35!