Last weekend we managed to get our sparkling wine bottled.  Our blend of Bacchus / Gewurtztraminer / Ortega was put in 75 cases of heavy, sparkling bottles with a little sugar & some encapsulated yeast.

What’s encapsulated yeast you ask?  It’s a new development in the winemaking world, the yeast to be used for the secondary fermentation (the one that produces bubbles in the wine) is held captive in a ball made of alginate (seaweed). The yeast can’t get out, but sugar can get in, and alcohol can get out.  so the secondary fermenation takes place inside these little balls of yeast. 

Why would this help?  Because when it comes time to get the yeast back out of the bottle, the beads just fall gently to the neck, and we are ready.  No long riddling process to get the yeast to settle.  The picture below shows a bottle of Sparkling wine with the beads of yeast.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Blog Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.