Sparkling Wine and Corks

[rebusify]

This is a two part question and thank you in advance for all of your feedback. This forum has helped me tremendously.

1. What are your best tips/steps for turning still wine into sparkling wine?

2. Would you use a cork on a sparkling wine bottle? Reason I ask is that I don't have any wine bottles for screw on caps.

 

[user 36973]

An easy solution if you don't want to bottle it would be to keg your finished wine and force carbonate it. If you have a beer-making setup, you are good to go.

A more challenging option is go the "methode champenoise" traditional way of making champagne-style wines. There are plenty of other resources out there that can provide details, so I won't copy them here. Just be careful that you use bottles that can handle the pressure. This means using the real champagne bottles, not sparkling wine bottles. Pressures can reach over 5 atm in the bottle and make them little bombs. I've seen the bottoms exploded out of the bottles while touring cava storage caves in Spain.

You do not have to use corks if you wish. The sparkling wine bottles will take the 26mm beer bottle crown caps and the champagne bottles will take 29mm bottle caps. You just need the right sized head for your capper. If you use corks, be sure to wire wrap them.

 

[stickman]

There is some good discussion and references for petnat in the previous thread below.

https://www.winemakingtalk.com/threads/petnat.70264/

 

[winemanden]

Here's a couple of pics showing how they do it the old fashioned way. It's an Italian commercial wine called col de l'utia frizzante VENETO. It's yet to be opened so I can tell you what it's like. If you do a youtube search on Knots you can find a video showing how it's tied. If you make a full sparkler, and do it that way, you'll have to put a small metal disk on top of the cork or the pressure will split the cork. That's the reason for the metal disk on Champagne etc. Regards to all, stay safe! Den