Sealing the elderflower champagne

The elderflower champagne is proving to be even more volatile than we expected. First it was just one bottle that kept on blowing its cork, which we put down to it being the last one filled and this it getting more than its fair share of the yeasty sediment. Since then, though, we’ve had 15 cork ejections, each of which is accompanied by a fountain of sticky, fizzy wine.

The outhouse floor is tacky to the touch, and the box the bottles were in has had to go out as it’s soaking wet and falling to bits. I think we got off lightly, though. A comment on one of my other blogs outlines her far more destructive experiences:

I made a batch of Elderflower champagne two weeks ago and bottled it in plastic fizzy drinks bottles. Yesterday evening there was a huge explosion and both bottles had exploded all over the kitchen! The biggest shame is that the champagne smelt amazing but was splatted all over the ktichen floor! Any advice on what I can use to bottle the champange? Is glass any better than plastic or will it do the same?

The answer is, I don’t know. I’m not surprised the plastic bottles exploded, and I’m hoping the glass ones will better retain their integrity.

In light of this ominous warning, though, we moved the cast iron dustbin from the garden into the kitchen, half-filled it with cold water and placed the bottles inside it, in the hope that keeping them cool would save them from fizzing away to their noisy popping doom. It didn’t make much difference. For every cork we replaced, two more would come flying out, this time crashing into the lid of the bin like Animal smashing his cymbal.

The cat didn’t like it.

So this morning we drove back to the brewing store to buy some steam-shrinking caps to secure the corks. They are a plastic cup that you place over the head and neck of the bottle, then hold in the steam of a boiling kettle until they shrink into place.

Beside them on the shelf was the method for making elderflower champagne, with a warning on the bottom that the results will be ‘highly effervescent’.

So we brought the caps home and slipped them onto the bottles then held them over the steaming kettle (we tried a pan but the steam wasn’t sufficiently focussed), but this brought problems of its own. Holding them over the kettle inevitably heated up the bottle, and with it the cork, which then started to bulge out of the top of the neck. Two blew out in my hand, blasting off the steam-shrunk caps, but running them under the cold tap seemed to remedy things on later attempts.

So now they’re all capped and stored back in the bin (I’m taking no chances) and we’ll see what happens. Even if they don’t do much to stop them blowing their tops, the new steam-shrinked seals do look good. And that’s something, at least.

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elderflower, elderflower wine