Help with Carbonating Elderflower Champagne please

[Davielovesgravy]

Im in need of A bit of help for my Elderflower Sparkly wine/champagne please.

I am about a week into fermenting 23L and I just took a sample, the SG is now at 1010, it tastes lovely and it is still bubbling every 30secs or so. My question is about the carbonation, I want it nice and fizzy so how do I get the fizz into this wine, do I bottle before fermentation is fully over or is it something that just happens naturally, or do I add priming sugar?

ALSO once bottled should it be stored in a warm place for carbonating please, and for how long?

Any help would be wonderful please. Many thanks

 

[salcoco]

a simple method is to let the wine fish and clear donot add k-meta or sorbate once clear add 3/4 cup sugar to 5 gallon stir well to dissolve sugar bottle in beer bottle with caps or champagne bottle. keep wine at room temp up right should carbonate in about a month. once ready keep refrigerated. be careful in pouring as some sediment will be in bottom of bottle. enjoy.

 

[Johnd]

Im in need of A bit of help for my Elderflower Sparkly wine/champagne please.

I am about a week into fermenting 23L and I just took a sample, the SG is now at 1010, it tastes lovely and it is still bubbling every 30secs or so. My question is about the carbonation, I want it nice and fizzy so how do I get the fizz into this wine, do I bottle before fermentation is fully over or is it something that just happens naturally, or do I add priming sugar?

ALSO once bottled should it be stored in a warm place for carbonating please, and for how long?

Any help would be wonderful please. Many thanks

The traditional way to carbonate is to complete fermentation and clear the wine. Once clear, the wine is bottled along with a prescribed amount of new sugar and stored while the little bit of sugar ferments, leaving carbonation behind, along with some new lees. The wine is then stored neck down and "riddled" for a period of time to help the lees settle into the neck. Once clear again, the bottle is disgorged (a process of removing the lees). There are special corking apparatus and disgorging methods using freezeing, among other technigues that make this process a bit challenging.

The other way is to use a soda stream type carbonating method after the wine is clear.

Problem with bottling still fermenting wine, is that you will end up with sediment in the bottles, and it's also hard to know when to bottle it so that you get enough carbonation, but not so much as to over carbonate your bottles and potentially blow the tops off, or worse.

 

[Davielovesgravy]

The traditional way to carbonate is to complete fermentation and clear the wine. Once clear, the wine is bottled along with a prescribed amount of new sugar and stored while the little bit of sugar ferments, leaving carbonation behind, along with some new lees. The wine is then stored neck down and "riddled" for a period of time to help the lees settle into the neck. Once clear again, the bottle is disgorged (a process of removing the lees). There are special corking apparatus and disgorging methods using freezeing, among other technigues that make this process a bit challenging.

The other way is to use a soda stream type carbonating method after the wine is clear.

Problem with bottling still fermenting wine, is that you will end up with sediment in the bottles, and it's also hard to know when to bottle it so that you get enough carbonation, but not so much as to over carbonate your bottles and potentially blow the tops off, or worse.

Many thanks John, I am going to let it ferment out and then prime with 1tsp per Litre, thanks a lot.

 

[Frenchy]

I'm curious what was your starting gravity ? Reason for asking if you are finishing much over 7 - 8 % you are probably not going to get the fizzy your looking for, alcohol kills fizz also another way to achieve your fizz and have a clear product is to force carbonate you'll need a corny keg and Co.2 tank and regulator works very well and if you don't want to bottle you can serve from the keg best of luck