How To Make Wine: Different Ways To Degas Your Wine

One of the most important aspects of wine making is degassing once the fermentation is completed and this blog post will show you a variety of videos which demonstrate different ways of accomplishing this.

This is the part in any wine kit instructions where they say to “stir vigorously” (with a spoon or drill attachment) for a minimum of 2 minutes so that you can flatten your wine out.  If you’ve ever tasted homemade wine that hasn’t been properly degassed you can tell as it has a bit of a “fizzy” taste to it and it just doesn’t taste very good.

Video 1: The Basics of Wine Degassing

The other issue you’ll have if you don’t degass your wine properly is that your cork could pop out of the bottle or, worse case, your bottle could potentially explode due to the build up in pressure in the bottle.

In An Ingenius Way To Degas Your Wine I showed how you could use a wine vacuum pump (i.e. what you could use to suck out the air in a half-drunk bottle of wine) to degas your wine.

Video 2: Using A Wine Vacuum Pump To Degas Your Wine

I use this method with every batch of wine I’ve made since I discovered it, and the results have been fantastic! The biggest thing you’ll notice is that your wine comes out nice and silky smooth.

The brand of wine vacuum I used in the above video is “Snail”. You can find it by going here (it’s about 2/3rds of the way down the page).

 

Here are a few other videos that I found on YouTube that demonstrate different ways you can degas your wine. Hopefully one or more of them peaks your interest!

Video 3: Degassing Your Wine Using Your Washing Machine

Video 4: Degassing Your Wine Using A FoodSaver

Other methods I’ve heard used to degas your wine include:

1. The “Manual Method” where you grab your carboy and shake it with your hands (although this sounds really messy if the airlock pops off).
2. The “Sparging Method” where you place an air stone with a tube attached to it on the bottom of your carboy and pump nitrogen through it. The nitogren is an inert gas and will force the carbon dioxide out of your wine. This is a bit more involved (and expensive) and is one I’ve never tried myself.

It ultimately doesn’t matter which method you use so long as you do it!

If you have a different method you use please let me know by leaving a comment below!

To your wine making success,

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

My Wine Is Too Gassy – Help!

I received the following email this week from J.V.:

Scott,

I recently bottled my wine after 28 days of secondary fermentation. The wine was clear of sediment and had a good underlining taste, however it was very gassy. Can you tell what I did wrong? Or should it be like this?

Thanks – JV

Here’s my response:

Hey Jason,

Good question. If you find that your wine is very gassy then my question to you is what you did to degas your wine after the secondary fermentation was finished and you moved to the clarifying and stabilizing stage. This is typically when you and a clearing agent and sorbate to kill the fermentation. This is also when you should be stirring for several minutes to get all of the carbon dioxide out of your wine must. You can either use a spoon or a “Fizzex”, which is a tool you attach to your drill. It looks like this.

One step I also use is introducing a vacuum in the carboy and sucking out the CO2 that way. I have found that it works really well and really smooths out your wine.

I also did a video on this method that is worth checking out:

At this point if you find that your wine is too gassy (and you’re not enjoying it) then you might considering dumping it all out and degassing it, let it sit then re-bottle. Ultimately you need to let it go flat in the same way you would if you left a bottle of pop/soda over night and let all of the CO2 escape.

Make sense?

- Scott

If you have some advice for J.V. feel free to include it in your comments below!