Disgorging, and brine composition

Greetings,

I'm about to embark on my first attempt at disgorging. I've read a great many references to help me settle my nerves. I consider this my last chance to ruin what was at first a wonderful chardonnay, even if lacking completely the oak character that I enjoy, and then a tasty, if cloudy, champaign. Wish me luck that I blow my chance... ;)

What I haven't been able to find in any reference is any mention of the quantities of salt and water used to make the brine solution the necks will be frozen in. Not a single web site, magazine, pamphlet, or book has ventured into a discussion of salt/water ratios. Not being a chemist, I have only the layman's knowledge that water with sufficient dissolved solids will remain liquid at a temperature below the freezing point. And I must assume that the ice I'll be purchasing at the local convenience store will be a decent amount cooler than, say, 30f, so that it'll be able to bring my brine solution enough below freezing to do it's trick and freeze the champaign in the necks of my bottles. But it would give me a great deal of piece of mind to be able to find someone, somewhere, who could say "I've used a brine solution of 4 lbs salt in 4 gallons of water. Added 10 lbs of ice, and it worked great!"

Any tips from those who have managed this franky rather daunting task for the home winemaker will be greatly appreciated!

Reply to
Oberon
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Try this, they may be able to give you direction.

tdd@ tdd-grilliat.com

Reply to
Stephen SG

Oberon,

The lowest freezing temperature (of a little lower than -20 C / -4 F) for a brine (NaCl) solution occurs with a brine concentration of about

23% (w/w). So you could aim for that. Disgorgement is often, however, conducted in brine solutions at -15 C (5 F), which corresponds to a brine concentration of both 17 and 25%.

Based on that, I'd recommend staying within the range 15-25% brine solution. A solution of 20% would be ideal. This would require 200 g/l salt or 1.7 lbs/US gal. Using 1.5 lbs salt per US gal. would be fine.

HTH, Ben

Reply to
Ben Rotter

Ken - The ice/brine mixture is the same sort of thing used for making ice-cream at home. You want the ice as cold as you can get it, and a whole bunch of rock salt. I don't think it hurts to have too much salt - it just doesn't dissolve. I've also seen comments lately that calcium chloride works better than regular salt, as the freezing point of the CaCl solution is lower than that for brine. Where I live (Minnesota), this stuff is readily available as a product to melt ice off sidewalks in the winter time.

I tried using this approach, but just couldn't seem to get the whole mess cold enough for long enough to freeze the wine/sediment in the neck of the bottles. I finally gave up and just rigged up a little rack to hold six bottles (neck down) in the freezer. I find that if the crown cap on the bottle is in contact with the wire shelving in the freezer, the neck of the bottle will start to freeze in about 3 to 4 hours.

The only downside to this is that if you forget the bottles in the freezer, they will freeze solid, and the crown cap may be forced off (resulting in loss of the Champagne, and quite a mess in the freezer). So you want to set a timer or something. Other than that, though, this worked just great. Six bottles at a time was a manageable number; it took me about a week to work through the double-batch (about 5 cases) I made this winter. I even have a case or two left, amazingly enough.

Best of luck. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it after a few tries. I made a few spectacular messes (mostly in the kitchen) before I really had the thing down, but it was fun, and (when done right) very satisfying.

Doug

Reply to
Doug

Actually, it *does* hurt to have too much. The freezing temperature of the brine will decrease until it reaches a certain salt concentration, afterwhich the freezing temperature of the brine solution will

*increase* again. This is why I recommended staying with the *range* of 15-25% NaCl solution in my previous post.

Very true. I believe they commonly use CaCl in Champagne for this exact reason. Using an ~30% w/w CaCl solution you can get the freezing temperature of the solution down to -60 F / -50 C.

Ben

Reply to
Ben Rotter

Thanks for all the responses, I really appreciate all the facts and practical knowledge people have offered up. I've now made the attempt, but like Doug I found that 40f champaign bottles immersed ~2 inches into a 20f brine solution (the coldest I could get the brine solution to go) for up to

10 hours just don't freeze at all. On the other hand, I got a lot of things done around the house after I figured out that the one hour freezing time listed in Morse's 'Making Mead' was a fantasy. :-/

I've located a local supply house that sells a 10lb block of dry ice (~-100f) for just under $20US. Given that I hate making multiple trips, I spent half that amount on ice (I only needed to use half of it, but I had no way of knowing that when I set out to the local Food King for ice) in my first attempt, so I consider the cost well within reason. I'm fairly confident that I can get the brine to drop a few more degrees using portions of the dry ice block. And I spoke at length about the hazards of dry ice to the shop worker who fielded my call, and feel fairly confident that I won't be freezing off any limbs while working with this material. ;-)

I'll take pains to perfect my disgorging gear before the next try, as I found that I could only use 12 of the 15 bottle holes in my rack, due to the fact that my tray for resting the necks on doesn't have the surface area to support all 15 bottles. So I live and learn in more than one way...

Friday night / Saturday morning (in the cool evening/morning hours) I'll make my second foray into disgorgement. Wish me luck!

Reply to
Oberon

Oberon,

I've been making sparkling for several years and this is my non-scientific method which has worked well for me. Several friends use the "inverted bottle in the freezer" method but I find that it takes too long to freeze the bottles. First, I chill cases of inverted bottles in the refrigerator overnight. When I am ready to degorge I make up the brine solution with rock salt and ice(crushed works best). I use rock salt made for making ice cream which I get at Wal-mart. Five pounds costs a few bucks if I remember. I make up the brine solution (following the directions on the rock salt) in a small one gallon, plastic, insulated Coleman jug alternating 3 inch layers of crushed ice and 1/2 inch layers of salt. The key for me is to let the ice/salt mixture sit for about an hour and get really cold before starting. During this hour I gather the necessary supplies, sterilize the stoppers, etc. Then, one bottle is shoved down into the ice/salt mixture and the neck will freeze in about 3 minutes. I pull that bottle out when frozen, stick another one in and while the second one is freezing I rinse off the brine solution, degorge, pour in the dosage, and cap it. That takes a few minutes and the second bottle is ready to degorge. The whole process is a one man assembly line and I can degorge a case in less than an hour.

Reply to
John F

Been reading this thread with great interest, Ken. We are just now about to bottl our first sparkling wine, so we've yet to embark on this 'daunting task'.

The salt and ice trick was how we intended to go about disgorging, but I've been wondering lately if a bed of dry ice pellets might be more effective?!

clyde

Reply to
Clyde Gill

I'm not an expert in thermodynamics (nor do I play one on TV), but I was once told that dry ice was not as effective because the water in the brine solution would conduct the heat much more effectively. Basically this is because of the increase in contact area compared to even small ice pellets.

Of course, we could always pour a glass of liquid nitrogen and freeze a room temp. bottle in no time.

Andy

Reply to
JEP

It sounds like you are referring to the difference between having some liquid in contact with the bottle, as opposed to dry pellets?

The technique I'm talking about incorporates alcohol with the pellets, which would allow for the same transfer, only with colder temps.

clyde

Reply to
Clyde Gill

Yes.

That sounds promising. If you have a very cold freezer, you could probably go with just the alcohol unless you were handling a lot of bottles.

Andy

Reply to
JEP

The total will be about 1000 bottles. We will probably do a limited amount of disgorging at first. Would be nice to knock out a majority of them in one swat. If it's not already obvious, this is our first try at methode' champagnoise. Though I'm versed at the process from doing it at another winery, they had some decent equipment. So, much like the rest of my winemaking, we have to make do for now.

Among the 'junk' that was here when we arrived was what I'm thinking must be a rack to hold the inverted champagne bottles into the ice:

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I'm pretty sure that this came from an old Catholic Seminary in St. Louis called St. Stanislaus. It can hold four cases at a time, so I can imagine that the necks would freeze in that amount of time. We'll place the riddled bottles into a chest freezer before starting the operation to get the wine temp as close to freezing as feasible. This alone will limit the volume we can disgorge at a time, but there's no real hurry for this wine. It's more for fun than profit.

clyde Steelville, Missouri, USofA

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Reply to
Clyde Gill

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