One of the nice things about having a space that we call our winery is the ability to work with our wines in our own way. This year, we are getting back to making a sparkling Chenin Blanc, something that we did in our basement in 2017. At that time, we were making pétillant naturel also called pet nat for short, which is the ancestral method of making sparkling wine.
This year, we thought we would try to make a sparkling wine in the bottle with disgorgement of the lees. In order to do that, we had to "catch" our fermenting Chenin at the right level of Brix, which is our case was 2
o.
On October 27, the fermentation looked like the bottom photo. We were able to tap off 3 cases of Chenin Blanc using the sampling valve.
My husband purchased some bidules to insert into the bottle before sealing the bottle with a crown cap.
A sugar concentration of 2.4% w/v is enough to produce 7 atm pressure in the sparkling wine bottles, which generally will withstand 8 atm pressure.
1 The method that we will be trying is still along the lines of a pétillant naturel but we hope to remove the dead yeast cells at the end of the process by concentrating it into the bidule, riddling and disgorging.
References:
1. K.H. SteinKraus, Encyclopedia of Microbiology (Third Edition), Pages 138-143, Cornell University Press, 17 February 2009.
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