Do you have bubbles in your kit wine?
When you have a blog here at WordPress, you can see what searches bring people to your site. Almost every day I get somebody to here who is wondering what to do about bubbles in their wine.
My very first batch of kit wine had the same problem. Let’s assume the wine tastes fine, it hasn’t turned bad, it’s just sort of carbonated. There are a couple of ways this can happen:
Patience - or a lack of it. That very first batch seems to take forever, doesn’t it? I know, I remember that feeling. One problem is trying to force the wine to finish quickly. It won’t. You can raise the temperature to make it ferment quicker, but that’s actually a bad idea. Be patient. If it says to give it 10 days to finish, 15 days isn’t going to hurt the wine, but it might help it. On the other hand, only waiting 8 or 9 days could be the cause of the problem. It needs to finish fermenting.
Residual Sugar – Another possibility is that there was unfermented sugar in the wine when you bottled it. Then over time the yeast slowly digested the remaining sugar. This is why you don’t want to rush the process. If you don’t see any bubbles in the wine, it should be done. Check the specific gravity, if it isn’t around 1.000 or lower, you probably still have sugar in there. You might want to add a package of yeast and see if it can restart the fermentation. I’ve never had this problem, but fermentation can stop if you have too much sugar or it got too cold. If there is too much sugar, the yeast will ferment until they get drunk and die. Most wine yeasts can handle up to around 15%, some will go as high as 17%. After that, they just can’t convert any further. If it’s too cold, the yeast may inactivate. My most recent wines were fermented at around 60 degrees C without any problems.
Stir - You know how it says to add the chemicals and then stir for two minutes? Did you only stir vigorously for one minute? Maybe you stirred half-heartedly. Then you had to add the fining agent and stir vigorously once again. I know, your arm hurts, poor baby. Take a break, come back and stir a little more. I stir in one direction, then once it gets going, reverse. Repeat until you stirred for at least the required time.
Rack – When I make homemade wine, I will rack the wine at least once before bottling, even if it is just to a bottling bucket. I believe the racking process releases a lot of the trapped gas. The kits don’t tell you to do this, and I think most starter equipment kits don’t come with a bottling bucket. It’s funny, I’ve never had a problem with gas in my homemade stuff, only kit wine. I’m not sure why. I’m thinking maybe the bentonite traps some of the gas in the pores of the clay. Maybe the multiple rackings releases the gas.
Sweetened? – Is it possible you sweetened the wine with sugar and didn’t add Potassium Sorbate before bottling. You need a half a teaspoon for every gallon of wine, 1 tablespoon for a 6-gallon batch. If you added sugar thinking the yeast has been left at the bottom of the fermenter, think again.
So you have bubbles in your wine and it’s bottled. Open the wine bottle and decant it to something else, let it sit for a few minutes and pour glasses from the decanter. It will help remove most of the bubbles, but it won’t make it perfect.
Drink it and enjoy it, it’s still delicious wine.
marlene connors said,
April 12, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Do you have any advice on the following question .
Its 18 days ,and my wine is still fermenting .I am going away for a month . Can I leave it for the month to continue fermenting then add the chemicals when I return ? Is this too long a timespan ?
Thankyou
Scott said,
April 13, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I answered Marlene directly, so I got a few answers. Most importantly, her wine has already been racked to a carboy. I was afraid she still had it in the fermenter.
Wine is fermented in a bucket for the first week because the fermentation is very active. It bubbles so much it can clog an airlock – and that’s not good. So once fermentation has calmed down a bit, we move it to a carboy. It will still continue to ferment for a week or more, depending upon sugar content and temperature. What is most important here is to let the wine finish fermenting. It could take a month if it is going slow, don’t rush it.
So as long as Marlene has an airlock on, going away for a month isn’t a problem. I did add the suggestion that the carboy be away from direct sunlight and not in a place where the temperature will vary too much.
Chelsea said,
March 14, 2009 at 9:52 am
Our home wine is at a 2.0 hydrometer reading and were 2 months in. It was in a cold spot. Can we still drink it?
Scott said,
March 14, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Chelsea,
I need a whole lot more information before I would take a guess at what has happened. 2.0 is really high even to start a wine. If you have a specific gravity reading that is really that high, your fermentation never even started. There are a few possible causes: bad or old yeast, the must is too cold, or too much sulfites so that even yeast can’t grow.
If you don’t have mold growing on the juice, you can taste it and see how it tastes. If the cold is the cause, there are two things to do: 1. put it in a warmer place, at least to start the fermentation, and 2. make a starter. If you use a starter, you will know that the yeast is active and there will be so many active cells that even a cold must will start fermenting.