How to bottle champagne???

OK, so I am getting my order together for two wine kits, sundries, bottles, and a corker. I was going to go with the Portuguese Floor Corker. I was going with the floor corker as I plan on doing over 100 bottles a year and I will be bottling by myself. I ran into a problem though in that I also want to make a champagne batch every year or so. Is there an inexpensive way to cork/cap champagne?? Does the Italian Floor corker do it?

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I wanted to use these plastic stoppers, as I know mushroom and champagne corks are hard to work with.





Do you just push these in, wack them in with a mallet, or do you need some type of press? I can't see buying a separate machine as I am likely to only do one batch a year.

I think that's the idea, but whack them gently.

Sure, bottling with those plastic stoppers is easy. All you need are: the stoppers, the wire hoods, the champagne bottles of course, a rubber mallet & a small tool for twisting the wire hood. I think any HBS that carries champagne hoods will also carry the twisting tool. It's only about $5 & it really is required to tighten the wire hoods, and it's really easy to use.

Just fill your bottles as you usually would, then just tap the sanitized stoppers into the bottles with the rubber mallet, make certain they're all tapped in good. Once all the bottles have stoppers in them, start with the wire hoods. The tool is a steel hook in a wooden handle & it turns as you sort of crank it. It sounds more complicated than it is, it'll take you 1 or 2 tries to get it right & figure out how many turns to tighten without breaking the wire, for me 7 turns was perfect. Regards, GF.