Exploding bottles

[eduk8or]

My brother bottled a batch of strawberry wine. about a month later, all of the bottles exploded. Some one told him that when you make fruit wines and back sweeten, it reactivates the yeast and causes it to start fermenting again, thus creates so much pressure that the corks blow off of the bottles. He was told that the only way to prevent this was to filter the wine before bottling.


Is all of this true. I am wanting to start a batch of fruit wine, but do not want my bottles exploding. What do you guys do when making fruit wine??

 

[Wade E]

What probably happened was that he did not add k-meta and sorbate before back sweetening and wait to make sure refermentation did not restart by checking sg with hydrometer. This is an absolute neccessity to avoid exploding bottles! It is called stabilizing.

 

[masta]

The process of stabilizing the wine with the proper amount of potassium sorbate (1/2 tsp per gal) and potassium or sodium metabisulfite is what prevents the active yeast from fermenting the added sugar when back sweetening.


This process is the same not matter what type of wine you are making.


Filtering the yeast out is possible but you would need a very small micron filter and is not practical, necessary, or worth the time and effort..

 

[Dean]

I stabilize my fruit wines with Sorbate. Sorbate acts as a birth control agent for yeast! It prevents them from multiplying, so after I back sweeten the wine, there will be a little fermentation until the remaining yeast die. That's why I always sweeten and leave it for a few weeks before bottling.

Filtering will work too, however, the filters that are available to home wine makers are not fine enough to adequately remove the yeast. You need to be below 0.5 micron. The Buon Vino mini-jet #3 pads come close at about 0.6, but not close enough. You'd need an enolmatic sterile filter to get all the yeast out.

Sorbate works just fine and does help to prevent bottle bombs.

 

[PolishWineP]

Dean! Nice way of explaining it. Birth control, it's a good thing!

 

[jsmahoney]

When you talk of exploding bottles, are you talking broken glass or popping the corks? Is there a way of noticing this before it happens? Corks slowly pushing out, bubbles, leaking corks? Or is it just a suprise attack? js

 

[Wade E]

Probably see corks rising and maybe sediment on the bottom since there
is fermentation. I would imagine just corks popping but dont know and
hopefully never will. Fingers crossed!