Sealed transfer of sparkling wine to bottles advice needed please!

[Lollim96]

Hi everyone

I’m currently in the process of fermenting a Winexpert white wine kit. I’ll be transferring this into a 19L corny keg and carbonating at 50psi to produce a sparkling white wine which will be similar to Prosecco for the wife.

I want to bottle into champagne bottles after carbonating in the keg. I have the bottles, plastic champagne corks and the wire cages along with the tool for tightening the wire cages.

I’ve bought a Keg king Ultra Fill bottle filler. This is supposed to allow me to do a sealed pressure transfer of the sparkling white wine from the keg into the bottles.

My question is this. If I use the keg king ultra bottle filler to do a closed transfer of the wine from the keg into the bottles then I’m obviously going to have to remove the filling device from the bottle in order to insert the cork? Won’t the bottle lose all its pressure after the device is removed from the bottle before putting the cork in?

And after removing the filling device from the bottle, won’t the headspace between the wine and the cork in the bottle neck fill with air? Meaning I’ll have a layer of air between my wine and cork which surely will impact carbonation?

Does anyone have any general advice please regarding this process and or using the keg king ultra filler? I’ve never used this device or done a sealed transfer before.

Having never kegged anything before I think I probably jumped in the deep end with sparkling wine at 50psi. But I hope I can make this work.

 

[Somesaymybeerisdrinkable]

I have only bottled beer and cider from a keg. Some CO2 will come out of solution when you bottle using a counter pressure filler will minimize it. Fill the bottles to minimize headspace there will still be air in the remaining headspace, but you can minimize that by capping on foam. Agitate the bottle before corking so that more CO2 comes out of solution to displace the air then seal the bottle. I doubt you will lose enough CO2 to notice.

 

[mac_1103]

Yes, you have to de-pressurize the bottle to remove the filler, but it's filling under pressure that keeps the CO2 in the wine. You can avoid having air in the bottles by corking on foam. You will lose a small amount of the carbonation, but not enough to notice.

Everything has to be extremely cold. As close to freezing as you can get it. Watch some you tube videos. Not sure if you'll find any for that specific model but I'm sure there are plenty out there for similar fillers.

 

[Bobby_M]

I'm afraid it's not going to happen. You're going to make a huge foamy mess and the bottles are only going to be half full if you're lucky. You'd have better luck trying 20psi and get that wine down to 30F in the keg overnight. Sanitize the bottles with ice cold starsan. It's better to have moderate carbonation and keep most of it than super high and lose almost all of it along with half the wine. Worst case scenario, you try a few bottles and if it's going horrible, just drink it from the keg.