Stabilising or not.

I would like to explore bottling home brewed wines without using stabilising chemicals.

If the wine is not to be back-sweetened with fermentables, and there is only a small air gap in the bottle, is it not possible to even leave out the campden (potassium metabisulphate) tablet, since there will not be much oxygen in there?

That's what I do. Of course, I haven't been at it that long, but so far so good.

I make dry white wine in the fall and start drinking it the next May and by August its all gone so I don't worry about adding any chemicals. I bulk age it in a carboy until May
then "bottle" in 1/2 gallon jugs. When I open one it stays in the refridgerator until finished.
My red wine has to age 1-2 years and I add campden at racking.
Commercial wineries have to use chemicals because they have no way of knowing how the wine will be stored/handled or how long until it it consumed.

With <1/8" of head-space in 750ml bottles, I found it very hard to get past 18 months without serious oxidation in strawberry and plum wine. Per others here, I started bottling with a 1/4 - 1/2 dose of k-meta, and early signs are encouraging.

--SiletzSpey

@siletzspey What were the symptoms? Did you only realize when you tasted it, or was there some other way to determine what was happening?

buMbLeB said:

@siletzspey What were the symptoms? Did you only realize when you tasted it, or was there some other way to determine what was happening?

Click to expand...

Only when you go to drink it, unless you can see the color changes (darkening) before that.