Commercial wine blowing corks.

[Cheesy_Goodness]

I didn’t think it was possible, but my wife and I got home from a Christmas visit with my family and found that a cork from a wine bottle shot out from built up pressure and soaked the inside of our cabinet. The weird thing is it wasn’t homebrewed, it was commercial.
It’s a Carlo Rossi Merlot that I originally bought in a gallon jug. Since I needed the jug for a fermenter, I figured I would rack the wine into sanitized bottles and cork them for later use in cooking/making vinegar (not really tasty enough to drink on its own).
If it was a homebrew wine I’d say I messed up with stabilizing it, but why in the world would a commercial wine cause a cork to blow?

 

[prandlesc]

My guess is something besides wine got into the bottle and the pressure build up is due to that organism.

 

[T_Baggins]

Hmm...could also be mechanical in nature if not organic... was the wine cold or cool when it went into the bottle? how warm is this cabinet space? see where I'm going with this?

 

[Cheesy_Goodness]

I guess it could have been some sort of infection, but if the wine was stabilized shouldn't that have prevented an infection from taking hold?
I don't think it had anything to do with temperature. It was likely stored within 3-5 degrees of when it was re-bottled. I had two bottles stored like this, one exploded. I opened the other one just in case of buildup but the second, non-exploded one wasn't carbonated at all.

I guess all signs are pointing to an infection of sort, I just can't figure out how it would have happened if the wine had been stabilized.

 

[T_Baggins]

could it have been a bad cork?

 

[Cheesy_Goodness]

It could have been, but the splatter pattern (I felt like Dexter Morgan looking at the stuff) indicated that there was some pretty hefty pressure built up before the cork blew.
A bad cork might not have held pressure well, but I'm not sure why there was pressure in the first place.

 

[LostBrewer]

I've found that if there is infection in the poorly cleaned bottles, (had fruit flys in the house) the strongest presure build up is the ones which eat alcohol. I had a good batch of cider I bottled the day before, and when I work up, and went to pour more to drink and the damn flip top sounded like a shotgun going off when it opened. It wasn't cider any more, it was a nice carbanated apple drink which was going to vinager quick.

 

[Cheesy_Goodness]

The best explanation sounds like some sort of infection at bottling. If it was a lacto infection I wish I had known since that's what I was keeping the wine to do haha.

Thanks for the replies everyone

 

[Twerp129]

Carlo Rossi is certainly sterile filtered. Yeast fermented the massive amounts of residual sugar left in the finished wine.