Degassing Your Wine

Jul 30, 2007 4 Replies
J

I'm in the middle of making my first two batches of wine using a couple of Ken Ridge kits - Piesporter & Australian Shiraz. The instructions call for adding Potassium Metabisulphite to remove residual carbon dioxide gas. It also mentions "shaking & stirring the carboy". My question: is the Potassium Metabisulphite really necessary or could the carbon dioxide be removed by vigorous stirring and shaking?



TIA



John


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K

I have no idea. Ask your question in a newsgroup about making wine. Most of us here know how to drink it, rather than how to make it. ;-)

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M

Ken is right that rec.crafts.winemaking is a forum designed for home winemakers. However, as a professional chemist I can offer some thoughts about what's going on here:

  1. Potassium metabisulfite (a source of SO2) is designed to remove
*oxygen* from the wine, not CO2. It's also an antimicrobial, so it helps kill any bacteria or wild yeast that might otherwise lead to spoilage.
  1. Shaking and stirring will remove only the CO2 in excess of its solubility in the wine.
  2. If you want to remove more CO2, you can either do a vacuum filtration, which will also remove other volatile components, cold stabilize your wine by cooling to -5 °C or so or sparge it with an inert gas like nitrogen, argon or neon. This last technique is both expensive and probably deleterious to your wine.
  3. Many professional winemakers like to leave some CO2 in their wine to give it more verve. You might want to sample yours before and after shaking and see what effect it has on the taste and mouthfeel.

HTH Mark Lipton

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J

Mark,

Thanks for the information and suggestions.

John

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