Degassing

Just to point out, you only need to degas wines that have very short secondary times. Wines that bulk age for months to years really do not need degassing. That tingle can very well be excess co2 in the wine.

I'll have to disagree with droopy. Even though I wait almost a year before bottling, from carboys with several rackings, I invariably got too much CO2 in the bottled wines before I started degassing. I use a bottle-brush in a variable speed drill once the weather warms up in May and yes, sometimes it foams too violently, which just means lower the speed for a while.

huh, what temp do you keep your carboys at? I have never detected any co2 in wine over 6 months old at home.

We had this discussion before and it appears experiences vary (as always). I've got noticeable CO2 on most cold fermented whites even after 9 months of aging. The bulk aging is done at room temperature because I don't have a colder storage room, and at that time the wine would have been racked at least 2-3 times after the ferment.

On a tangent - I have a red/black currant mixed that got stuck at about

I'm not surprised at ernie's scenario... The CO2 has to dissipate by diffusion through the airlock. This is a very slow process; petulance in my wine takes about 1-1/2 to 2 years to dissipate under similar conditions in a glass carboy. If this process wasn't so slow, you'd also enjoy detectable oxidation of the wine during this time. The process will occur more quickly in an oak barrel because of the higher gas permeability of the wood compared to through glass.

(For you science nuts, both the CO2 leaving and the O2 entering the wine through the airlock occur by equimolar counterdiffusion. Plus there's a small boost in dissipation rate by expulsion during thermal expansion of the wine.)

Gene

ernie wrote: