We have opened the first bottle of Elderflower Champagne. It was a long time coming, but I thought that two years in the house, and having friends around for the weekend was good enough reason.
Unfortunately, despite being the first bottle opened, it was also the last complete bottle we have. We made 15 and a half in total, all of which except for this one and the other half bottle blew their corks and spewed their contents on the outhouse floor. Now we have only the half bottle left.
So was it worth the wait? It’s been corked up for eight months now, slowly maturing in the outhouse and gradually getting clearer as time went by.
We got five glasses out of that bottle, of which the first two were perfectly clear. Unfortunately its natural effervescence stirred up the sediment at the bottom of the wine, which clouded the other three glasses and may have contributed to their slightly rough flavour.
The result certainly wasn’t unpleasant, but I prefer our home brewed wine, which is smoother and more rounded. The elderflower champagne – the first I’ve tasted – was much sharper and a little bitter, and not quite the taste of summer I’d been hoping for.
But it was… interesting. Perhaps we’ll try again this year with a few subtle amendments.
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I was searching the web for “bottling champagne” and came across this blog.
Sorry to hear that your 2008/2009 Elderflower Champagne didn’t turn out as hoped. But on the positive side, I can tell you that you were very lucky to get through the experience unharmed!
I would urge you to try the Elderflower Champagne again – my mother makes it from time to time and it’s wonderful stuff. But please follow a few pieces of advice:
1. Never try to bottle any liquid that is still fermenting in anything other than a re-usable beer bottle, or a champagne / sparkling wine bottle.
The reason is (and you were extremely lucky that your corks popped out) that normal wine bottles are not strong enough to withstand high pressure contents. Only certain beer bottles and champagne bottles are made with extra-thick glass that will stand the pressure. If you had managed to seal your bottles tops (for example with champagne corks and wires) you would have ended up with 15 exploding glass-bottle grenades. There are 1001 accounts to be read on the internet of people spending months finding shards of glass around their kitchens and cellars.
2. It’s probably best to bottle only after a significant amount of fermentation has been completed. Take a specific gravity reading next time, to be sure there’s not too much sugar left for fermentation. Or if you’re doing everything au-natural, just taste the stuff to gauge how much more fermentation is going to happen.
As I’m sure you know, fermentation converts sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. If you’ve got heaps of sugar left in the liquid when you bottle, you’re going to be trying to keep gallons of CO2 contained within each bottle as the fermentation continues.
3. With regards to yeast, adding too much isn’t going to make your Champagne more volatile in the long run. Lots of yeast might make the process start off a bit faster, but at the end of the day you have a simple chemical process occuring that will convert all of your sugar into ethanol + carbon dioxide. The amount of carbon dioxide produced (volatility) is exactly proportional to the amount of sugar you start off with.
The only exception to this is that your yeast might only be tolerant to – for example – 10% alcohol. So even if you’ve got enough sugar to produce 15% alcohol, your yeast will stop working when the alcohol level rises to 10% (you’ll end up with very sweet wine).
4. Read around the subject a bit more. I’m sure you’ve done your homework a bit, since you already make wine and you got the ingredients for the Elderflower Champagne somewhere… but when I read about you bottling in normal glass bottles immediately after the stuff started to ferment, I worried that you might not know completely what you were getting yourselves into.
I’m only an amateur brewer myself, but the honey mead I’m currently working on has already brewed to 10% alcohol and I’m only now considering if I should bottle it early to produce a sparkling wine, or let it run the course and be flat.
Good luck in the future.