So, we’ve been finishing the sparkling wine production, ready for sale during the Cowichan Wine & Culinary Festival. 

Thought I would post a few pictures to illustrate the fun of “disgorgement”

Sparkling wine done in the traditional method involves a secondary fermentation in the bottle.  At the end of this process, the yeast must be “disgorged” in a process that results in the removal of all yeast from the bottle.  As I posted earlier, we used encapsulated yeast, so the riddling step is effectively eliminated, as the encapsulated yeast easily collects in the neck of the bottle without the traditional months of riddling.

So, the basic steps in disgorgement involve

a) chilling the wine  - CO2 is much more soluble in cold wine than warm wine so much less CO2 will be released if the wine is chilled to as close to freezing as possible

b) freezing the neck - the bottles are placed neck down in a bath of ice & brine (-15 deg C) which freezes the yeast to the crown cap

c) removing the crown cap (and attached yeast), while losing as little wine as possible.

d) topping up the wine lost during disgorging

e) adding a “dosage” if required.  Dosage is typically a reserved amount of sweet wine which is added to change the sweetness level of the sparkling wine once the yeast has been removed.  We didn’t do this as our Sparkling wine is “Brut” which is very dry.  (Technically we could have called it Brut Nature - which is a zero dosage wine)

f) resealing the bottle with the final closure.

So… here are some pictures:

our bottling crew

Here I am, ready to pop the crown cap off

And there she blows...

trying not to lose too much wine...

Our wwoofer Anna, topping up the bottles

Our other wwoofer Sebastian, re-capping and inspecting the final product

We made good progress on the first day, but it will take 2 or 3 more days to finish the batch, and then labelling and we’re good to go.

It’s very cold, wet & messy, but smells wonderful.  Probably the only opportunity I’ll ever have to shower in bubbly!  (unless I win the superbowl….. or a formula 1 race?)

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it….

Mark

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Blog Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.