Corks Popping Out of Bottles

Sounds like some sort of secondary fermentation has emerged in your Strawberry wine. Did you by chance sweeten the wine? And if so, did you not stabilize with some Potassium Sorbate to prevent further fermentation? I'm guessing you may have sweetened your wine a bit, and the leftover yeast in the wine started to ferment the new sugar that was just added.

Before I started to add a wine stabilizer to all my wines, I had some popping corks with 2 or 3 batches which I thought were ready to bottle and had been bottled for more than a few months. It is quite a mess. Since I like my wines semi-sweet (or not bone dry) I stabilize (with sorbate) all my wines. Darlene

Thanks to both of you that responded. I had sweetened my wine about 3 weeks ago, and did not add any sorbate. I understand that a secondary fermentation must have occurred. I will add sorbate when my peach wine is finished, and after it has been sweetened. Can this be added immediately following the sweetening solution?

If you go to Jack Keller's site,

, he suggests adding 1 crushed campden tablet, the appropriate amount of wine stabilizer and sweetener per 1 gallon, and then waiting at least 10 days before bottling. He does suggest waiting longer, which I have started to do over the past year or so. Darlene

I suggest that you uncork any bottles of the strawberry still corked and stabilize them. You were lucky that the corks popped instead of the bottles shattering.

A few years ago, I tried making a cream wine by adding some grape syrup to a gallon jug that had stopped fermenting months before and bottling soon after. About a month later I was outside working on something when my wife ran out to tell me of a series of explosions in the cellar. I went to check and found that the bottles had all blown up, scattering shards of glass around the wine cellar. Had anyone been in there at the time, they would have been seriously injured.

Paul