When corks pop off

[Brew and Wine Supply]

If you are getting any fizzing at all while bottling with an AI1, you need to de gas more. Bottled some Norton, thought I de gased enough but now its a sparkling norton, I use 8's and have not had any pop yet.
Guess I'll open them all and de gas again......

 

[GeoS]

The vacuum pump system such as the All In 1 are great, however, they do not completely degas your wine. In order to get the gas out of the wine you need two things, aggitation and heat. Since heat can only be achieved in moderate amounts, and you don't want to cook your wine, it's up to aggitation.
Splash racking does aggitate and release gas but it's not enough. You would have to splash rack about 6 or 7 times to degas. I use a whip after splash racking with a vacuum pump. This takes me about 1/2 hour to 45 min.

Also, if you tween the pH by adding a bicarbonate you will need to let the wine sit for a few days then degas again.

 

[vacuumpumpman]

If you use the Allinonewinepump from the start you will have at least 6 rackings prior to bottling. Everytime I rack I use the degassing cane - which definitely agitates the wine and uses film degassing method also.
As long as you bring your temperature up to 72-74 degrees and vacuum rack - you should be ready for bottling.

 

[GeoS]

I'm not familiar with a degassing cane? How does it work.

 

[vacuumpumpman]

This is a quote from Grasshopper - who originally designed the concept. I make and sell them at a reasonable cost -

http://allinonewinepump.com/accessories.html


This falling film technique degasses significantly better than just letting the stream entering the receiving carboy fall and splash to the bottom. There is also much less foam generation. The foam is a result of air entrapment in the wine (even with the reduced pressure from the vacuum pump there will be some air in the carboy) so it probably results in less potential for oxidation (just guessing on this last point). Dralarms suggests shortening the inlet leg of the cane to make this less awkward and Steve suggest having a dedicated bung for this to make it easier to switch from degassing to normal racking.

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Default Falling Film Degassing
From my previous life as an engineer I know that a falling thin film of liquid is very efficient for mass transfer (i.e. moving a material to/from the liquid phase to the gas phase it is falling through). It is efficient because the transferring material (CO2 in our case) doesn't have far to go within the liquid to reach the surface and the turbulence of the film continually renews the surface with fresh CO2 containing wine. Thus I devised the following method of vacuum racking that should be more efficient than simple splash racking to move CO2 from the wine into the reduced pressure gas phase in the carboy. The method should work for gravity racking but probably not as well.

I took the racking cane which has a short leg at the top bent 90 degrees from the longer leg and inserted this into the stopper so that the transfer tube connects to the long leg and the short leg is in the carboy pointed at the side. Pulling a vacuum on the carboy causes the wine to impinge on the side of the carboy and fall down the side. See pics in the file below.

I have tried this a couple of times now and it seems to do a much better job of degassing compared with just having the wine fall straight to the bottom in a single stream. I wonder if anyone else has tried this and/or knows of a reason why it may not be as good of an idea as it seems.

 

[GeoS]

Makes sense. Thanks. That certainly should help.