Effervescence

[crusher]

I opened the first bottle of a new batch of Wine number one last night and there was a slight "shh" sound. As I pour it into the glass very fine bubbles can be seen rising in the wine and when you drink it there is a gentle "fizz" on the tongue. It still tastes very good I might add.

The finish SG was 992 and I have checked this bottle and it is still 992 so it doesn't appear to have restarted fermenting, could it be that I havn't degassed it enough?
Will it be OK to leave as is or could the gas build up? Don't fancy exploding glass bottles.

[ms67]

if your wines are corked then this should give a long time before the bottle does, so don't worry about flying glass fragments.

[NorthernWiner]

It sounds like the wine was not completely de-gassed before bottling.

[goldseal]

Agreed. Make sure your wine is at least at room temperature before degassing. At lower temperatures it won't give up its CO2.

In my humble opinion, splitting each gallon of wine into 2 demijohns, then shaking, is the most effective way of degassing. Not so easy with 5 gal carboys though

If it makes you feel better, I had a bottle of commercial Sauvignon Blanc the other night which still had a lot of CO2 in it.

[elleks]

This could be a malo-lactic fermentation. It's supposed to be a good thing, and people sometimes aim for it.

[lockwood1956]

I wouldn't think it would be malo lactic in a wine No1, it is most likely a degassing issue

[NorthernWiner]

Bob's right. Very unlikely it would be MLF if you are using pasteurized juices.

[elleks]

My mistake-I'm still new to this. Would the same apply if I used chilled juices?

[crusher]

Thanks to everyone who replied, it looks like I will have to be more thorough with my de-gassing in future.

[fatbloke]

My mistake-I'm still new to this. Would the same apply if I used chilled juices?

Just because it's unlikely to be MLF, doesn't mean it wasn't a well raised point....

I'd say that you have a look round the forums for info about MLF so that you can judge the likelihood of it occurring in one of your own batches...plus then it should give you some idea about whether it's going to be desirable or not, on a given batch.

After all, we're all here to learn...

Thanks to everyone who replied, it looks like I will have to be more thorough with my de-gassing in future.

If you look around the tools section of ebay, you can often find a device a bit like a stirrup pump, that sort of works in reverse i.e. it's actually designed to suction out oil from engines etc, but is very easily adapted so that it sucks through a bung, so that it uses the suction/low vacuum to pull the CO2 out of solution. I seem to recall them not being too expensive and if used gently/sensibly there's no issues with applying vacuum of that small amount to a DJ (you might have to do this vvv slowly if you're using plastic DJ's/better bottles.......

Just my 2 pence worth...

regards

jtfb

[kampervan]

if its in bottles dont let it get hot as it will pop corks. not really a prob at this time of year.