Liquer de tirage calculation

[Oatmeal999]

Hi,
I'm new here!
I was given a wine kit as a gift. At the moment its thin and about 9% ABV. Drinkable but nothing special at all. I thought I may use a proportion of it to produce sparkling wine with the champagne method. I have some old champagne bottles and a capper.

I've found only one guide to the composition of the liquer for bottle fermentation (admittedly only 10 mins on google) and wanted to double check the accuracy. File attached.

Just wondering if this is accurate or if there are other guides out there?

Thanks!!

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Oatmeal999, and welcome.
With apologies but I don't open attachments whose source I have not checked - the cost can far outweigh the benefits with malware so rife these days. But that said, making a "champagne" type wine is a real skill - riddling requires a way to store bottles at the appropriate angle with the top facing down and requires regular turning to force the sediment produced by the yeast into the neck; then you need to freeze the neck so that it forms an ice plug and then manage to open each bottle so that the build up of pressure forces that plug out and you then quickly re-cork without too much loss of the remainder of the contents. As I say there is a skill that one needs to acquire. A simpler method may be simply to add an appropriate amount of sugar to the entire batch once the wine has fully fermented and then bottle in champagne style bottles (that can withstand the pressure). But note, such sparkling wine will be brut dry - not sweet, though an alternative method might be to fully ferment the wine; stabilize it ; back sweeten it and force carbonate it (like brewers do) with CO2.

 

[Seamonkey84]

Sounds like your batch is already done. Like Bernard said, you should be able to just add the proper amounts of priming sugar and bottle carb it. That is, as long as you didn’t chemically stabilize it with the sulfite and sorbate that’s comes with many kits, or been sitting and fully cleared for more than 4-6 months.

 

[Oatmeal999]

Thanks for the replies. Really appreciated! Fully understand not opening the file. Didn't think of the malware risk! It basically shows that for a given base wine alcohol content, the sugar concentration of the tirage will produce a given pressure. So for 9% alcohol base wine, addition of 23g/l tirage produces a wine with 6 bar pressure. It mentions that 16.5-17g/l tirage increases the alcohol by 1%. So my 9% wine becomes 10.3%.

The major missing piece, unless I'm missing something is the volume of tirage!

My understanding is that the liquer de tirage contains sugar and yeast and perhaps some acid, depending on the base wine.

The secondary fermentation occurs in the capped bottle which is left sur lees for some time and occasionally given a shake before riddling, disgorging via ice plug, topping up with liquer de dosage and corking then bottle ageing again.

The bits I'm uncertain about are:

- does bottle fermentation run to dryness and the sugar content of the final product is mostly due to the dosage?

- can this crappy wine withstand a year on lees in the bottle? I suppose I'm less worried about this, more I would like to try the process

- is there a reliable source for calculating the tirage depending on the alcohol content (and maybe the residual sugar) of the base wine?

- do i have to use champagne bottles? Would cava or prosecco bottles do or are they not strong enough?

- what is the ratio of base wine to tirage?

I should mention that this is practice for fermenting a crop that I'm hoping for from my small 100 vine vineyard in Ireland, of all places.

Long and complicated I know! Again, tha is for the input. This is all very new.

 

[Oatmeal999]

Ah... just realised that the base wine is brought to the 23g/l mark then bottled...