Bottling temp

Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum

Help Support Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

bstnh1

Supporting Members
Supporting Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2012
Messages
2,176
Reaction score
5,996
Location
In the woods of New Hampshire
Need some advice on bottling...........do you bottle the finished wine without regard to its temperature or do you wait until it's cooled to the temp of the storage area? I'm concerned about the effect the temperature differential and expansion/contraction of the wine might have on cork movement.
 
Mine gets bottled in the area where it is stored. It gets bottled at whatever the storage temp. is at the time. At the same time, the carboy has probably been sitting in the same spot for a month or two. I have never been concerned about the temp. when I bottled. Arne.
 
The is a very good concern. I do not remember this exact topic ever coming up on this site..

Obviously, the cooler, the better. The area that I store/bottle my wine is below grade so it remains always pretty cool. There is no harm in waiting if it is too hot.

As far as expansion/contraction, this can be controlled by exactly how full your bottles are. When I bottle, I always leave about a fingers width of an air pocket. That gap allows for the tiniest bit of expansion. Without that gap, the non-compressable wine can/will expand past the cork.

johnT.
 
I guess that I have never given this much thought because my cellar stays in the 65-70 F range all year. I bottle in the same area as I make the wine and store it in a section of the basement that may be one or two degrees cooler. As far as filling the bottles, I go just above the shoulder, maybe 1/4-1/2", on a Bordeaux bottle and about 3/4" below the cork on Burgundy and Hock.
 
My basement runs anywhere from 45 to 50 degrees in the winter. Great for bulk aging and storage. But I can see problems with bottling at that temperature when the wine is later exposed to basement temps in the upper 60s and when bottles are brought out of the basement and exposed to warm summer temperatures. I've read that commercial wineries slowly raise the temperature of their finished wine to 60 degrees during the week before bottling to avoid future stress on the bottles and corks due to the wide temperature fluctuations they are exposed to during transportation, storage, sitting on store shelves, etc. If I bottle at 45 degrees and later bring that bottle upstairs on an 85 degree summer day, that's a 35 degree difference and I suspect the cork isn't going to be happy.
 
Is stress on the cork due to anything besides pressure in the bottle? It seems to me as if the pressure change related to the temp change is trivial. The rule is P1/T1=P2/T2 but the temp is measured in degrees Kelvin, which in your example are 280K and 300K. That is less than a 10% increase in absolute temp and correspondingly only a 10% increase in pressure, or <1.1 atmospheres, which would appear to fairly insignificant relative to the dramatic increase in pressure with the volume reduction involved with corking.

It may well be that there are other considerations such as the rate of rise in the temperature, effect on the glass, etc.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top