bottle exploded

[mersydo]

i made 20 bottles of peach wine a year ago that i opened the first bottle of about a month ago. some people that tried it didn't think it was sweet enough so i added a sugar/water "syrup" to some bottles and recorked. on most of these bottles the corks have blew out and if i took them out the wine came out under pressure ( like as in champagne ). two nights ago i was taking the cork out of one and the cork seemed to be coming out unevenly and then--------an explosion occurred as the bottle blew into many pieces. it was under such pressure i had to go get stitches in two fingers-and i felt fortunate that was the only place i needed stitches. could this have been a defective bottle ( these were new bottles but i did heat them for 15 minutes at 190 degrees to sterilize them )? or-was it probably due solely to fermentation starting over again? i was under the assumption that after a year, fermentation would not start up again just by adding sugar. i've become a little gun shy--any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Deezil]

If there wasnt any potassium sorbate involved in your wine, i'm almost positive that it was refermentation in the bottles that caused the explosion.

After a wine ferments dry, adding potassium sorbate and potassium bisulfite will keep it from restarting like you witnessed. Giving the sorbate/sulfite solution time to affect the whole batch (i think its roughly a week?), you can safely backsweeten and bottle without worry

 

[grapeman]

Not a defective bottle there, just a huge mistake of adding sugar water and recorking. Never do that. The only safe way would be to take all of them, dump them into a primary bucket, add more potassium metabisulfita dn potassium sorbate to manufacturers specifications such as 1/2 teaspoon per gallon. Once stabilized, like this, you may add the sugar water or juice to taste. You may then bottle it and be safe against renewed fermentation. Unless you sterile filter the wine with a .45 micron filter, you will have yeast in your wine which may start up again after adding sugar.