I have seen these oak barrels for sale on ebay. I would like to use them to store multiple bottles of asti champagne. I wanted to find out from someone who knows more about champagne than I do whether this will work. I am concerned the barrel will affect the taste and/or not allow the champagne to be stored for a long period. (couple of months)
Thanks.
You mean empty the bottles into the barrel? Or make the wine in the barrel? Or use the barrel to just store full bottles? Sorry, it's not clear. For the first two you'll lose pretty much all the CO2 and end up with a still wine. The third one is fine because the oak barrel won't have any effect but then why bother?
For reference, Asti is fermented in a tank and the yeast is removed before all the sugar is consumed. The wine is then filtered for clarity and bottled, all done under pressure to keep the CO2 in. The result is a sweet, low alcohol sparkilng wine, with intensely fruity aroma because of the grape variety used (Muscat) and short contact with yeast lees.
Pp
No. You'll lose much of the C02 as you transfer the wine. What is left will seep out through pores in the barrel fairly quickly.
Greg G.
ok, I have never ever considered doing this before. How hard is it to make your own champaign? Do they sell kits that can be used with barrels?
At best it might end up pettilant with more of a fizz than foam; don't know how you could drink a barrel full either. (I'm not being sarcastic, you can't keep wine in a partially full barrel, once you start emptying it you have to empty it completely.) The barrel is designed to hold pressure out, not in. An old beer barrel might work but those are lined with pitch and you would lose most of the pressure transferring it. Beer barrels were much heavier than wine barrels.
Joe
Why on earth would you want to store Asti Spumante in barrels? There is n't a single commercial sparkling wine including champagne that is stored in a barrel. Champagne incidentally - as with Cava from Spain - and no doubt several other sparkling wines (but certainly not Asti - as far as I am aware) is initially fermented in a barrel and later transferred to a bottle where it undergos a second fermentation, which gives the fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! Put sparkling wine back into the barrel and you lose the fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
These newsgroups really do give an insight to another world, don't they?
World'sWorst
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