When we opened a couple of our recently-bottled bottles, bubbles appeared in the neck. I also notice a few bubbles in one of the bottles lying down. It tasted fine, but perhaps the following is the problem. Maybe as a result of the wine getting too much disturbance and oxidisation during the bottling.
Refermented
Fine wine is a living thing, the product of controlled fermentation. Occasionally, some residual, dormant yeasts will wake up, and a wine will undergo a second fermentation after it has been released and shipped. This manifests itself as effervescence, or fizziness, on the tongue. Of course, this is desirable in champagne (which is purposely refermented in the bottle in order to create the bubbles), but never in fine still wine.
http://nymag.com/restaurants/articles/wine/essentials/badwine.htm
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Friday, July 2, 2010
Lessons learnt
This weekend I plan to open one of the bottles we bottled four weeks ago and see how it tastes.
There are a number of things we could have done better, at least in theory. Before putting the wine into them, the bottles were simply washed out with water and just left upside down in the sun for a while. So we're not talking about a perfect sterilization here! Then we used a garden hosepipe with a funnel to fill the bottles, with my thumb over the end to control the flow - this means the wine gets oxidated a lot which isn't good for it - the more correct thing is a narrow tube which you insert to the bottom of the bottle and I guess you can pinch the tube to control the flow. And it was only after putting corks into all the bottles that I remembered the shopkeeper told us to soak them in water overnight beforehand... although considering cork resists water I can't see this making a giant difference. Well, lessons for the next time.
The costs were not massive. Each bottle costed around 120Ft (40 Euro cents), and the corks and foils costed very little. Fancier coloured glass bottles would have been a bit more, about 160Ft, but for a red wine which will be stored in a cellar, colour wasn't important. The investment was the corking machine at 15000Ft (50 Euro), and it was worth it - there are cheaper models available but harder to use.
However even with considerable economy of scale, I cannot see how professional wine makers can make a profit producing wine which retails on the supermarket shelves for as little as a few hundred forints a bottle .
There are a number of things we could have done better, at least in theory. Before putting the wine into them, the bottles were simply washed out with water and just left upside down in the sun for a while. So we're not talking about a perfect sterilization here! Then we used a garden hosepipe with a funnel to fill the bottles, with my thumb over the end to control the flow - this means the wine gets oxidated a lot which isn't good for it - the more correct thing is a narrow tube which you insert to the bottom of the bottle and I guess you can pinch the tube to control the flow. And it was only after putting corks into all the bottles that I remembered the shopkeeper told us to soak them in water overnight beforehand... although considering cork resists water I can't see this making a giant difference. Well, lessons for the next time.
The costs were not massive. Each bottle costed around 120Ft (40 Euro cents), and the corks and foils costed very little. Fancier coloured glass bottles would have been a bit more, about 160Ft, but for a red wine which will be stored in a cellar, colour wasn't important. The investment was the corking machine at 15000Ft (50 Euro), and it was worth it - there are cheaper models available but harder to use.
However even with considerable economy of scale, I cannot see how professional wine makers can make a profit producing wine which retails on the supermarket shelves for as little as a few hundred forints a bottle .
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