Gravity observations

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I recently made a Chianti that got stuck at 1.004. For weeks I tried every trick in the book to get it down with no success. I’ve read posts about exploding bottle and corks popping if the Sg isn’t brought down.

I have two comments about exploding bottles.

When brewing beer it is a common practice to add additional sugar at bottling to carbonate the beer. No explosive bottles because this is a normal practice.

Secondly I was concerned about a wine that I could not get below 1.004. I happened to purchase two 3 liter bottles of a Merlot and a Cabernet to top off a couple of red wines that I am racking off. Just for fun I decided to take a gravity reading and both were at 1.005. So after considering both these scenarios, why should I be concerned about higher than normal gravity readings.

Comments?
 
I recently made a Chianti that got stuck at 1.004. For weeks I tried every trick in the book to get it down with no success. I’ve read posts about exploding bottle and corks popping if the Sg isn’t brought down.

I have two comments about exploding bottles.

When brewing beer it is a common practice to add additional sugar at bottling to carbonate the beer. No explosive bottles because this is a normal practice.

Secondly I was concerned about a wine that I could not get below 1.004. I happened to purchase two 3 liter bottles of a Merlot and a Cabernet to top off a couple of red wines that I am racking off. Just for fun I decided to take a gravity reading and both were at 1.005. So after considering both these scenarios, why should I be concerned about higher than normal gravity readings.

Comments?


Well, the commercial wines that you have probably have no yeast in them; they were probably "sterile-filtered" with filters that would remove yeast cells. Have you sterile-filtered you wine?
 
beer bottle are built to take the additional pressure for carbonation that along with the screw cap keeps from exploding. wine bottles are not built that well plus cork usage will usually be the part that explodes by ejection. if the wine tastes okay add potassium sorbate along with K-meta and bottle you will be okay. the sorbate will stop the yeast from growing no fermentation no pressure.
 

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