OK, true confession time.

I made my first wine (from a kit) about 8 months ago. For the last ~6
months it's been bulk aging in a soda keg. At the time I added some
extra metabisulphite like the instructions said to do if you were going
to age the wine for more than 6 months.

I also homebrew beer. A week or so after I racked the wine to the keg,
I kegged a batch of beer. I force-carbonate my beer after kegging ...
and, well, one soda keg looks pretty much like another ...

So there I was with sparkling merlot. I figured it would eventually
degass itself if I kept depressurizing it, but it really never did. I
took to violent keg-shaking every time I walked by for a week, but it
was still fizzy. I wanted to bottle it before Christmas, so I finally
got a serious paint-stirrer at the hardware store (one of those ones
that looks like a squirell-cage fan) and fired up the drill. That
seemed to do the job, so I then bottled it (about 2 weeks ago). It
tasted fine then.

Now I've been reading more and I discover that I probably should have
added more metabisulphite when I bottled it. Worse, it seems that what
sulphite was there may have been dispursed by the agitation (although
I'm still a little fuzzy on that part).

So my question is - how long will this wine last? Should I open up all
the bottles, add some metabisulphite, and re-seal? I put a bunch of it
in .5l beer bottles with crown caps, so it's not all that big of a deal
to do this. I expect most of the wine to be consumed in 2 to 6 months,
but I would like to keep a few bottles for a year or more. Should I
just doctor the ones I'm going to keep?

Thanks for the advice
ras

Any that you plan to drink within a year, I would not fool with. If you
plan to keep it longer you might consider adding some sulphite to. But
opening and adding sulphite is a rather brusing process and it has already
been abused a lot -- so maybe it would be better to just plan to drink it.

Ray

"ras" > wrote in message
ups.com...
> OK, true confession time.
>
> I made my first wine (from a kit) about 8 months ago. For the last ~6
> months it's been bulk aging in a soda keg. At the time I added some
> extra metabisulphite like the instructions said to do if you were going
> to age the wine for more than 6 months.
>
> I also homebrew beer. A week or so after I racked the wine to the keg,
> I kegged a batch of beer. I force-carbonate my beer after kegging ...
> and, well, one soda keg looks pretty much like another ...
>
> So there I was with sparkling merlot. I figured it would eventually
> degass itself if I kept depressurizing it, but it really never did. I
> took to violent keg-shaking every time I walked by for a week, but it
> was still fizzy. I wanted to bottle it before Christmas, so I finally
> got a serious paint-stirrer at the hardware store (one of those ones
> that looks like a squirell-cage fan) and fired up the drill. That
> seemed to do the job, so I then bottled it (about 2 weeks ago). It
> tasted fine then.
>
> Now I've been reading more and I discover that I probably should have
> added more metabisulphite when I bottled it. Worse, it seems that what
> sulphite was there may have been dispursed by the agitation (although
> I'm still a little fuzzy on that part).
>
> So my question is - how long will this wine last? Should I open up all
> the bottles, add some metabisulphite, and re-seal? I put a bunch of it
> in .5l beer bottles with crown caps, so it's not all that big of a deal
> to do this. I expect most of the wine to be consumed in 2 to 6 months,
> but I would like to keep a few bottles for a year or more. Should I
> just doctor the ones I'm going to keep?
>
> Thanks for the advice
> ras
>