Cork fiasco

[Stigmond13]

I've experienced losing a few bottles of wine before where I lay the bottles on their side and the cork slides out. I find that leaving the bottles for a couple of days upright solves this.

However, I ve recently lost a couple of bottles of wine where the cork has slide out after a few months in the bottle.

I am bamboozled! It's horrible losing the finished product after all the hard work and effort getting to that stage.

Would appreciate any tips on how to avoid in future.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[imasickboy]

I always leave them standing for at least a month before I lay them down. If it's something that I'll consume within six months, I don't lay them down at all. No leakers here, yet.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hiya Stigmond. Popping corks is typically caused by either
1. having bottled a wine that has not been allowed to sufficiently degas - so the CO2 in the wine has the possibility of nucleating as particles drop out of suspension and that gathering and collecting around the particles provides the gas with enough energy for it to drop out of suspension and so put enough pressure on the cork to pop! OR
2. bottling the wine before it has fully fermented allowing the available yeast to become active again and begin to ferment any available sugars that are still in the wine.
The easy solution for both these issues is ... patience. Once you think the wine is ready to bottle, rack it and wait another two months and when those two months have ended. repeat the action and after those two months have ended, repeat again.

A more mechanical solution for the first problem is to rack your wines using a vacuum pump pulling about 22 inches of vacuum and then before bottling pull the same vacuum for about 20 minutes.
For the second problem you need to allow the gravity of the wine to drop way below 1.000 - say , 0.096 or lower, allow the wine to age a few months, racking every couple of months (this removes the yeast) and then stabilize with K-meta and K-sorbate if you prefer a sweeter rather than drier wine. After stabilization you can then add sugar and the few available yeast cells won't be able to consume that sugar and they won't be able to reproduce...
Last point, You may want to check to see if the size of the cork you are using is the largest you can safely use with the bottles you have. I think a size 9 is wider than an 8 and as long as the bottle tops are relatively dry and the corks are dry (you should NOT soak them) the corks will not slip out. If you feel you need to sanitize corks you simply put them in a colander above an open container of K-meta and allow the SO2 gas to do its job. A wet cork offers less friction.
Hope that this helps.

 

[Stigmond13]

Bernardsmith you were 100% right. When you posted I was almost offended that you suggested that I had not allowed the wine to degas! Well I've just opened up a bottle from the same batch and have a sparkling mead!

Not what I planned but nonetheless very nice indeed!

Every day is a school day!!!

 

[bernardsmith]

I think we all tend to forget that half the weight of sugar in a wine is converted to CO2. That is a lot of CO2. If you ferment in a carboy sealed with a bung and airlock then really not much of that CO2 will have escaped when you rack a couple of times before bottling and if the ambient temperature rises or the air pressure changes or particles drop out of suspension then that absorbed gas will be expelled from that bottle with a great deal of pressure.

 

[kh54s10]

In my 8 or 9 batches I have sanitized the corks in Starsan. Which is very slippery.... I use #9 corks and leave them standing up for only a couple days to a week. I have never had a cork loosen. I do use shrink capsules to make the bottles look good.