it exploded :(

[Two_Sheds]

I gave a bottle of my fruit teabag wine to a friend for Xmas, and she's just told me it exploded: red wine all over the new kitchen

I've got 60 odd bottles in the garage and none have popped their corks, but I'll be opening them very carefully.

Despite fermenting to dryness and adding Campden tablets, I guess fermentation was still active
I'm now not at all confident of bottling any more

[janeyo]

Oh No!

I think you have just been unlucky with this lot. I had some apple wine in the summer exploding all over the garage after bottling, have since opened the rest (in the garage) and they have been drunk. But we only had 6 bottles, not 60.

Don't give up, it is all just trial and error for each recipe.

[vicky]

Just be careful - 60 bottles exploding could do you a lot of damage!!!!

[littlemark]

Bad luck, if you've fermented to dry you should be ok, but it's worth noting that Sulphites (Campden Tablets) alone don't neccesarily stop yeast activity unless used at quite high levels.

When we make cider, we dose the juice with 50ppm of Sulphite, which is the equivalent of 1 Campden Tablet/gallon to kill bacteria etc, but the wild yeasts are merely suppressed, and usually start working within a week or two. We may add another 50ppm later on, but would still always assume that there may still be yeast activity if there are any sugars remaining (or we add any to sweeten).

The problem with wine bottles is they are quite thin glass, so it only takes a relatively small amount of CO2 generation to turn them into bottle bombs. Commercial wine is generally sterile filtered for stability, the sulphites are there mostly to prevent oxidisation, not prevent fermentation. We don't have the luxury of this level of filtration, so unless we pasteurise the wine (not desirable for flavour of course), there's always the (very slight) danger that a supposedly dry wine will re-ferment when warmed up, or possibly develop a Malo-lactic 'fermentation' which can also also generate CO2. Higher doses of Sulphite would help, but there's a limit to how much of this most people are happy to use in their wines.

The simple way around the danger of exploding bottles is to spend the year collecting Champagne style bottles, giving them a good clean and check over for cracks etc, and bottle your wines this way. You can either cork with plastic sparkling wine corks and tie down (in which case you could also carefully prime lighter wines to get a sparkle), or just use ordinary wine corks. The worst that can happen then is the cork could pop out under pressure, which is messy but not nearly as dangerous as an exploding bottle.

We bottle all our cider this way, it gives us extra confidence when giving cider or perry as gifts or samples that we won't them main someone with glass shards.

Mark

[Two_Sheds]

there's always the (very slight) danger that a supposedly dry wine will re-ferment when warmed up

This is exactly what happened: my friend had the wine in her very warm kitchen for a couple of weeks before it popped its cork (the glass didn't shatter).

My other 60 odd bottles are in the (cold) garage, so they should be OK, fingers crossed

[Hilary B]

If it's fermented out to dry, there shouldn't be anything to ferment (barring malo-lactic, which can only happen if the recipe has malic acid, usually found in apples).
If the wine is strong enough, even with some sugar left, the alcohol should prevent further yeast activity (this is my preferred option, I keep adding extra sugar as fermentation slows down, until it simply refuses to do any more!)
I have a pet hate of sulphites, so I will use any alternative method available.
I've had less-than-ideal wines (usually gone vinegary because I didn't keep the water level in the airlock topped up), but never had one explode. I'm sure there are grapes who've done more, and plenty who've been more scientific, but I've done a fair few batches, on and off, over some 30 years....

[Mell]

The simple way around the danger of exploding bottles is to spend the year collecting Champagne style bottles, giving them a good clean and check over for cracks etc, and bottle your wines this way. You can either cork with plastic sparkling wine corks and tie down (in which case you could also carefully prime lighter wines to get a sparkle), or just use ordinary wine corks. The worst that can happen then is the cork could pop out under pressure, which is messy but not nearly as dangerous as an exploding bottle.

It does not need to take a year Just get friendly with a local wedding venue & you'll soon be over run with them ! I use grolsh style flip tops.

I'm an old fashioned brewer & use no chemicals just give everything ages to ferment out. Sometimes gets a bit silly as I only just bottled a demijohn from 1985 !