What’s with the fizz?
I bottled an Amarone from juice about six months ago. I have been trying it every couple of months to see how it is coming along. I opened a bottle last night and it has become carbonated. Is there any way to fix this?
Jeffrey Dillon
Glen Arm, Maryland
Since you report the wine “has become carbonated” it sounds like it was still when you put it in the bottle and you wanted it to stay that way. It also sounds to me like you have experienced a classic (but unwanted) re-fermentation in the bottle. Essentially, re-fermentations are avoided either by controlling the microorganisms that perform them (yeast or bacteria) or by controlling their food source (sugars in the case of the former, malic acid, alcohol and other substrates in the case of the latter). Whether caused by yeast, bacteria or a combination of both, post-bottle refermentation is one of the toughest problems a winemaker can face and one of the issues we all should work our hardest to avoid. First let’s walk through the possible causes and their prevention, then let’s explore your options for saving the wine.
Re-fermentation, whether in the bottle or during bulk storage, occurs when ambient microbes find and metabolize a food source in wine at a time not intended by the winemaker. In the case of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (wine yeast) cells, a re-ferment can happen anytime there are yeast present and there is still fermentable sugar present in the wine. During bulk storage (in barrel, tank or carboy), a yeast re-ferment is not the end of the world because the fermentation can finish out and you still have an opportunity to rack off the settled lees and bottle a still, clear wine. In the bottle, however, a re-fermentation is disasterous because the carbon dioxide, along with a sediment of the dividing yeast cells as they live and die off, are trapped inside the bottle with no means of escape. This leaves you, the winemaker and wine drinker, with a fizzy, cloudy and sometimes smelly bottled wine. Not pleasant.
Yeast are the most common re-fermentation culprit because they are ubiquitous in the winemaking environment and have a much higher alcohol and sulfur dioxide tolerance than most bacteria. To control refermentation caused by yeast, a winemaker must take away the food source, i.e. make sure that wines ferment to dryness — most wineries consider under 0.3% residual sugar to be dry but I use the more stringent number of 0.1%. You can check for the completeness of the alcoholic fermentation by using a simple “sugar pill” test sold by many winemaking supply stores or by sending a sample to a wine lab for a more accurate glucose/fructose assay. The winemaker must also control the yeast cells. The easiest way to do this is to inoculate your juice or must with an off-the-shelf yeast strain that is suited for the sugar concentration you’ve got. Particularly strong yeast, like EC-1118 (also called Prise de Mousse), have been known to motor through predictable alcohol levels of 15% or more and still conduct a fermentation to dryness. It’s also smart to follow good, sound winemaking practices that will avoid a stuck fermentation and therefore, residual sugar being left in your wine. Make sure the temperatures of red musts don’t get above 85 °F (29 °C), that the yeast have proper nutrition and that you don’t have a concurrent microbial infection going on. Read “Wine Wizard” from October-November 2002 for more details on avoiding a stuck fermentation.
One culprit is a somewhat rare and especially nasty non-Saccharomyces yeast, Brettanomyces, which is able to survive in wine conditions even when all fermentable sugars are gone. Believe it or not, Brettanomyces can eat carbohydrates (sugars) present in the wood of barrels. These five-carbon sugars, or pentoses, are unfermentable to wine yeast and can fuel a Brettanomyces bloom. If you want to find out if Brettanomyces caused your re-fermentation, you may want to order a test kit from White Labs (www.whitelabs.com) or send a sample of your wine to another wine lab for culturing.
In addition to yeast, there are plenty of bacteria that will happily munch on your wine if the conditions are right. Unless sterile filtered (and sometimes even then), there will always be bacteria of some kind living in your wine, even when it’s bottled. The key is as before: control the food source and control the microbes and you’ll avoid a re-fermentation. Bacterial food source control is a tough one as there are more than one class of things these guys eat. The most important possible food source to focus on is malic acid. Grapes naturally have a healthy amount of malic acid in them right off the vine. There are also a lot of microbes in the environment, especially Lactobacillus and Oenococcus, that enjoy malic acid, digest it into lactic acid and spit out carbon dioxide and aromatic compounds (like diacetyl, which smells like popcorn butter) in the process.
The best way to prevent a malic acid refermentation in the bottle is the old-fashioned way — by encouraging bacteria to eat the malic acid before it goes into the bottle. You can test its disappearance with home test kits or by sending samples out to a commercial wine lab. As you might predict, the most reliable way to make sure you get a complete malolactic fermentation is to inoculate with a known, strong malolactic bacteria culture purchased from your favorite winemaking supply. Oenococcus oeni is a preferred strain out in the commercial realm right now though supply houses (see list below) constantly come out with new strains every year, some suited especially for certain challenges like a high-alcohol environment or a low pH wine.
If you don’t put your wine through the malolactic fermentation (sometimes called the secondary fermentation in older winemaking manuals) then you’re going to have to use either sulfur dioxide levels (use more the higher the pH of your wine) or filtration to knock down microbial populations. An 0.45 nominal micron pad, or even one of the newer 0.45 micron-pore inline filter cartridges, will go a great length towards reducing the number of yeast and bacteria present. They are most effective if used right before going to bottle because wine that is filtered and then put back to bulk storage can easily pick up just as much microbial life again. With adequate free SO2 levels (28–35 ppm) you should be able to keep most bacteria in check as they’re particularly sensitive to SO2. Use more SO2 with higher pH wines. For example, I would feel comfortable carrying a dry, white malolactic incomplete wine with a pH of 3.25 at 28 ppm FSO2 while a dry red wine with a pH of 3.75 I would keep at 32–35 ppm. For these reasons, sanitation and proper SO2 levels at bottling is especially critical. Analyze how you bottled your batch of wine and make sure you did everything you could’ve to minimize the number of bacteria and yeast in the wine as you went to bottle.
Incomplete fermentations are the most common cause of re-fermentations in the bottle for the micro-producer. In addition to shooting for dry fermentations, as you take your wine through each stage of its lifecycle, it’s important to think like a microbe and mentally troubleshoot. A classic example of this is what I call the “blending refermentation.” This occurs when the unsuspecting winemaker blends two seemingly still and stable wines together and then stands by shocked as the new blend begins to bubble and take on a life of its own. This happens because, while the two wines separate were microbially stable (no food source or no microbes willing to eat it), together, they provided an environment favorable for a refermentation.
Sometimes microbes can almost lie dormant in a wine and will “wake up” when something new and exciting, like a certain amino acid or a new infusion of vitamins, comes their way. Sometimes a new ambient microbe will be introduced to the mix because you didn’t sanitize your hoses properly. Other times microbes will wake up after sleeping all winter; some believe that sparkling wines were discovered in Europe when cold, sluggish yeast cells revived in the warmth of a Medieval spring thaw.
As for salvaging this batch of wine, I’ll let you decide which path to take but I’ll caution you that, after decanting and trying to re-ferment the wine, it’s unlikely this lot will ever be as good as it was when it went into the bottle the first time around. Stuck or sluggish fermentations, and their subsequent re-fermentations, are microbial playgrounds and it’s likely you’ll find a lot of the original, ephemeral aroma has gone only to be replaced by spoilage aromas.
If you do want to try to attempt to get the wine to settle down, I encourage you to find the cause so you’ll know what you can do with the wine and what you can’t. If you have residual sugar you can attempt to re-start a stuck fermentation and see if that helps. If you have residual malic acid, you can try to inoculate the wine with malolactic bacteria and see if that does it.
The lazy-winemaker’s answer to this problem would be to decant the bottles, wait until the wine is no longer producing carbon dioxide (whatever the cause) and has fallen bright (if it ever does) and then sterile-filter and bottle again. Whether or not you decide to go through all this trouble for the chance to drink a mediocre wine, or just wait until next harvest to do your next lot right from the ground up is, as always, your call.
Here is a list of wine laboratories that sell yeast and bacteria, provide analytical services and can help with troubleshooting difficult fermentations:
Gusmer Enterprises: www.gusmerenterprises.com
ETS Laboratories: www.etslabs.com
White Labs: www.whitelabs.com
Vinquiry: www.vinquiry.com
MLF malfunction
As the weather warmed in May 2007, several of the wines in my basement started working again, similar in appearance to a MLF fermentation. I also noticed renewed fermentation in a few older 2005 carboys. I had blended a few wines, and wonder if that contributed to the problem. Can MLF bacteria become airborne? I have even considered sanitizing the area by burning some sulfur sticks. Help!
Joan Deacon
via email
If you read my answer to Mr. Dillon, you’ll already be most of the way towards your own. Spring and summer are ideal times for yeast and bacteria, who may have been mid-ferment when cold winter weather hit, to wake up after a long sleep and begin partying again! I’m sure many of our fellow readers experience this phenomena at some time. Like I told Jeffrey, if this re-fermentation happens when the wine is in bulk storage, I wouldn’t worry because you have plenty of time for the microbes to settle down (i.e. die off) once they’ve finished eating up whatever food source (sugar, malic acid or something else) that you’ve got in your carboys, providing it doesn’t take so long that the wine gets oxidized. If all goes well, you can rack off the sediment when the wine falls bright; it helps to blanket your containers with carbon dioxide gas to retard oxidation if the fermentation isn’t producing enough of its own. Just don’t bottle up a wine before it’s done “finding itself” or you’ll have carbon dioxide, turbidity, popped corks and off-aromas.
The fact that your older carboys have renewed some kind of fermentation is interesting and points to either a new microbial infection of some kind (see my notes about Brettanomyces above for one possible culprit) or means that you had some residual sugar or malic acid hanging around. Sending your wines out for residual sugar, malic acid as well as microbial plataing analysis is the only way to be sure. White Labs has a new home-plating kit as well as some yeast detection tools that may be of use. And yes, blending wines (again, see above) can indeed trigger re-fermentations. Picture a sweet wine with an inactive population of yeast being mixed with a dry wine that happened to have a few strong yeast cells left in it and presto, you’ve got bubbles.
As to your question about whether or not malolactic bacteria (like Lactobacillus, Pediococcus or Oenococcus) can be airborne, you bet they can be. In fact, I’d bet my Napa mortgage that you’re breathing some in right now. This is one of the most constant battles we winemakers wage — the constant onslaught of ambient (floating in the environment) yeast, bacteria, molds and fungi that live on the surfaces of our equipment, on our grapes in the vineyard and as a result in our wines. This is, after all, how “native” or “wild” fermentations start — because of the yeast cells naturally present in the air. Don’t go all clean-room on us, however. Not even commercial winemakers try to do that because while we can knock down yeast and bacteria cells to acceptable levels, it’s impossible to eradicate them 100%. Burning sulfur sticks in the air of your winery won’t do much — you’d be better off putting some elbow grease into your cleaning and sanitizing regime and investing time in making sure you’ve got adequate free sulfur dioxide levels in your wines during storage.
We all must come to accept, at some point or another, that rather than kill every last microbe in our wineries (which is impossible, even if you burn the place down) all we can do is try to get to know and live with those that we have. It’s important to control the possible food source, the microbes, and preferably both to avoid unplanned fermentations and microbial infections. Good sanitation, inoculation with known microbes and monitoring your critical fermentation parameters (residual sugar, malic acid levels, % ethanol and mg/L VA) will go a long way toward achieving those aims.
