No second fermentation in bottle? (or a very slow one?)

[Jeroen Goffin]

Hello,

I tried making a sparkling wine of grapes last spring, which failled because only some bottles fermented a second time. I think it was because of the high alcohol content in the wine (13°).

To get a little practice i tried again this summer with apple cider. We ran the same proces only this time the wine had 7° of alcohol before bottling. So no problems there.
We put the cider in bottles on the 8th of august after adding yeast and sugar. They have been in the basement (sur lattes) since then.

I tried opening a bottle today, there was some pressure there but not nearly enough, because we added 20 grams of sugar per bottle (there should be a real sparkle when al that is fermented, the calculated pressure was around 7 bars / 100 psi).

At this point you can taste the sparkle and the pressure rises when you shake the bottle so there is some carbonisation going on or has been going on.

Is it the temperature of the basement (around 15°C to 18°C / 59° to 64° fahrenheit) which keeps the yeast from fermenting?
Or is it normal for this proces to take this long (longer than 2 months) ?

I can't really find any information about the duration of the second fermentation in relation to the temperature. I am aware that as the temperature drops, the fermentation slows down.

We would like to sell this cider by new year

Thanks!

 

[salcoco]

I would agree that the low temp is slowing yeast progress. why not take some bottles and raise the temp and check results.