Strawberry Champagne

[Old Tymer]

I've been thinking about this for a while. Basically I wanted to know if anyone has made champagne from fruit wines. I talked to a guy who made it from regular white grape wine using the riddling method but I wanted to see if anyone has done it and how it tasted. Any thoughts ideas would also be welcome.

 

[Wade E]

I have made Strawerry and Crab Apple. I made the wine as normal with a starting sg of 1.095 and Red Star Champagne yeast and ket it go dry then added 2 ozs of sugar per gallon, stirred well and kept stirring while bottling. After 3 months of riddling I disgorged. At this point if you like dry youre done but if you want a sweeter sparkling wine then here is the next step.
Put into each of these bottles one ounce standard sugar syrup and one tablet of wine stabilizer (Crushed and dissolved potassium sorbate), and put these bottles into the freezer along with the wine. The stabilizer is essential to inhibit the yeast and prevent a third fermentation and possible explosions.
When the wine is cold enough, bring out one bottle of wine and one champagne bottle. After ridding the Sparkling wine of the sediment gently por the simple syrup in and top up if needed and recap.

 

[cpfan]

I carbonated a Strawberry White Zinfandel kit using forced injection. I'm not a champagne fan and wasn't fussy about, but others scarfed it down and wanted more.

Did some occasionally for customers when I had the Ferment on Premises store.

Steve

 

[Manimal]

I've currently got a tiny (4 bottles) experimental batch of sparkling apple wine undergoing secondary fermentation in bottle right now. It's only been in bottle for about a month now, so I'm not ready to disgorge yet. The still wine I started with was made just like any other apple wine... I used President's Choice apple cider as the base of the must and adjusted the sugar and acids to give me a potential alcohol content of about 10.5% and a TA of 8 g/L... you want your acid a bit high for sparkling wine. I added about 20g/L of sugar along with a bit of yeast energizer and yeast nutrient along with EC-1118 at bottling time and reserved a bit of the still wine for topping at disgorgement. The crown caps and capper I had on hand would not accommodate the larger necks of sparkling wine bottles so I am going to try a disgorgement technique that I've made up myself. In the meantime, I've stoppered the bottles with plastic champagne corks and secured them with the wire hoods.

 

[Old Tymer]

Thanks everybody for the input, I guess its not as uncommon as I thought. Im going to try it in the fall when i get some white grapes.