Sparkling Wine by Adding C02

[waynemart]

Someone once told me that you can bypass the whole second fermentation thing by injecting carbon dioxide similar to the way it is done in making beer. The trick, I was told, is to get a wine that has a 15% - 18% alcohol level, pour into your pressure chamber, chill the container in a bucket of ice, inject C02 to 20 psi for 2-4 hours, and bottle straight from the presurized container into Champagne bottles. The taste is supposedly no different than store bought Sparkling Wine and can be consumed at any time.

I don't want to invest in all the gear if this is not true. Do you know of any sources to check out?

 

[Tom]

We (tried) did that @ one of my wine club meetings. We added the wine to a corney and left it in a snow bank over night. We used a beer gun to transfer to frozen bottles. We got alot of foam and in 3 months was not very sparkling.
If you just want to carbonate one thats easier. Het a carbonater cap sold @ HB stores. get a 1 liter empty soda bottle and chill. Add CO2 to the carbonater and shake. Only good for 1 at a time. That worked great for my Reisling.

 

[smurfe]

Tom, did you cork them with corks or the plastic corks? Also the foaming thing is easy to prevent if the bottles are the same temperature as the liquid. All the foaming was why it probably wasn't too sparkling a few months down the line. You lost a lot of CO2 during bottling. I really don't know why you couldn't treat this the same as beer.

 

[Tom]

yea we did it @ joeswines home and yes bottles were cold, Corked (plastic) and wired
Maybe Joeswine will jump in here

The carbonator cap makes a great sparkling wine.
You can make one real cheap.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJD0bv9kLAQ[/ame]

 

[Wade E]

I have sparkling crab apple wine on tap and its very well carbonated!!!!!!!!!!!!! It takes longer to carbonate and takes a lot more hose to balance it out well for serving. Just like when you buy a corny keg set up and they give you 3' of hose. That 3' of hose is worthless as youll only get foam unless you carbonate whatever your drinking out of there very little. It took me awhile to figure all this out and I have 18' of hose for my sparkling wine and 10' for my beers. My beers are served at 8 and my sparkling at 19 . I dont hav the beer gun but Im guessing the same effect happened and with not enough hose you poured all foam which killed the carbonttaion.

 

[donnaclif]

I never really tried it, would love to give it a try myself, coz would love to bypass the whole second fermentation priocess

 

[waynemart]

These are good points about the length of the hose and keeping both wine and bottles at the same cold temperatures. It makes sense. Then there is the question about the temperature of the hose. Regardless of length, the fact that it is at room temperature, wouldn't the cold carbonated wine foam as soon as it gets in the hose? Or, maybe after the wine runs through it a while, the temp equalizes and the foam stops. I guess I won't know until I try.

And still there are the questions of how much c02 pressure should be put on the corny, for how long, and does it need to be agitated as Tom did with the soda bottle. I have 200 gallons of white wine that I want to turn into sparkling wine. I'd sure hate to have to do this one bottle at a time like Tom suggests.

You'd think YouTube would have something on the subject out of the hundreds of wine making videos. I can't seem to find anything on the internet at all and I know this is done by most US companies making sparkling wine.