Bottles Broke While Corking

Hi Paul

Both of these problems are caused by inadequate head space in the bottle. When a long cork is fully seated, there should be ~3/4 inch of head space remaining between the bottom of the cork and the top of the wine. I have a friend that actually made up a gauge for checking this until he had enough experience to do it by "eye ball". HTH Happy holidays !!

I have a winged corker not a floor model, I find that it is very sensitive to the stiffness of the corks. I've bottled with dry #9 corks and even after a dousing in boiling water they tend to leave mushroom heads. Then I started storing my corks in a potassium meta humidor and that seems to have solved the problem. I assume it was the long term storage in high humidity making the corks softer.

Don

A bottle filler would fill all bottles to the proper height all the time. One came in my kit. They cost about $3.

Sounds overfull to me too. I just use a cork as the fill gauge, I set it even with the top of the bottle and aim for 1/2" to 3/4" headspace. Be careful with 'Mondavi' style necks, they have that goofy top-hat type lip to contain drips. They can line up offset and the cork throw the bottle right off of the corker if you are not careful. Regards, Joe

You're not very clear about how the bottles broke. Did they break during or after corking? Are the necks breaking or are the bottles just shattering?

Are you using #8 or #9 corks? (#9's are wider.) Are your corks low or high quality - are they cork all the way through or are you using the ones with the plastic cores?

If the bottles don't break until after you put the cork in, is it possible fermentation is still going on and the bottles are breaking under pressure?

Personally, if the answer isn't apparent after you've asked yourself all these questions, and you got the bottles all from the same source, I would ditch the bottles.

-- "Nonsense. If your eternal balance is destroyed, | ^ /o\ |\ |\ why did the sun rise? If I'm a demon, why do I | |/\v/--- | |/ have such a headache?" -- Tamora Pierce, | b ^ | | | | "The Woman Who Rides Like A Man" | | / \ V \| |

The top of the neck broke off while the cork was being inserted.

High quality #9 corks, 1.75 inches long.

These were bottles from wine I'd purchased; after drinking the wine, they ended up in the recycle pile in my wine cellar.

Paul

Sounds like you need #8's for those, then...

I actually did a batch that I accidentally found out was sparkling by coming home one day and finding that 3 #8 corks had popped. Better than glass grenades, I guess, or I would have lost more than just 3 bottles!! I generally use #9's now.

-- "Nonsense. If your eternal balance is destroyed, | ^ /o\ |\ |\ why did the sun rise? If I'm a demon, why do I | |/\v/--- | |/ have such a headache?" -- Tamora Pierce, | b ^ | | | | "The Woman Who Rides Like A Man" | | / \ V \| |

I would stay with the 9's. Much better seal. I even use them for thin necked 375ml bottles (like Canadian ice wine bottles) with no problems.

I would check for the over filled bottle first and I would make sure the bottle lines up straight below the cork. If the bottle is at even a slight angle, front to back or side to side, it can put a lot more pressure on the neck plus require more force to drive the cork home.

Andy