Bottling Sparkling Wine questions

[BrewingBigDog]

Hello all, I'm new to the world of homebrewing, but I have a couple of questions about a sparkling strawberry wine I want to try to brew. (Sorry these are complete novice questions)

1) When I carbonate my wine, will it still age? The recipe I'm following is for a standard yet superbly delicious strawberry wine that one of my friends gave me as a birthday gift and my fiancee said she'd love a bottle of sparkling strawberry wine.

2) What would be the best way to bottle this sparkling wine? I intend to carbonate it with a SodaStream in batches.

Thank You for the help!!!

 

[CoreyD]

Have you tried carbonating wine with a soda stream? I tried juice and it blew up all over the place with one push of the button. Not sure how you could carbonate something other than water with one of those, without it exploding.

 

[pumpkinman2012]

There's a few ways of approaching this, since you stated that you're a new wine maker, I think that the following will be the easiest solution.

You will need champagne bottles, stoppers and the wire cages, this is an absolute must if you want to make a sparkling wine, any other bottle can and will explode once the pressure reaches a certain point.

Assuming that you're making a 5 gallon batch:
The easiest way to carbonate the wine without having to learn how to make a traditional champagne would be to rack the wine off the sediment to a bottling bucket much like we do when bottling beer, add 1-2 grams of a neutral yeast such as EC-1118 (hydrate it first) to the wine and stir it in and bottle it in the champagne bottles. The wine will be bottle conditioned just like bottling beer and ready to drink in 2-3 weeks.

If you are unsure of the residual sugar, you can add a few carbonation drops, Click Here, to each bottle.

If you used sorbate and back sweetened, this will not work, the sorbate will stop any new fermentations.

I hope that this helps.

 

[Pinchecharlie]

Not to complicate things but.. How does one determine the ratio of available sugars to a quantity of yeast to be added for a secondary fermentation? Example , you have a base of let's say 1.008 or 1.010 after primaryfermentation ( let's say we know its over for good but not bone dry) and you want to do a secondary fermentation in the appropriate bottle ect .. How much of an addition of yeast would you add for the sugar still available? And as long as we are making it hard. At what point on the hydrometer is to low to have enough sugar for a good carbonation and or low enough to add additional sugars? Thanks I will be doing a secondary fermentation soon so I had to ask .

 

[pumpkinman2012]

To be honest, when I first started brewing beer, I made a lager and I was apprehensive about the bottle conditioning, I read a post that suggested adding 1-2 grams of yeast to the bottling bucket, I used EC-1118, a champagne yeast that doesn't impart any flavors, it worked perfectly.
If your wine has stopped fermenting at 1.010, there is plenty of sugar to start a bottle fermentation/bottle condition, how low is too low? I would guess that the lower it is, it will be less likely to ferment.

 

[fuelish]

I use recycled beer bottles with crown caps for my meads, sparkling or not.... but yeah, not still wine bottles for sparkling wine. Figuring out whether one needs to add a small amount of yeast and sugar (and how much) is kinda tricky business. If I decide to make sparkling, I use yeast that can consume far more fermentables than provided by the recipe, let it ferment until you're absolutely positive it's done, then add bottling sugar/honey/whatever and bottle it up for conditioning...sometimes takes quite a while (compared to beer), but has never failed me