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We have bottled Muscat wine and with a few bottles (three out of 30) the cork seems to be pushing out.
The storage area is 12 Celsius. The wine was bottled in mid June of this year, by a small winery. This is a very recent event. All the other bottle tops are still that tiny bit concave.

What can be going on ?

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  • This would do better on homebrewing.se
    – Mennyg
    Aug 28, 2017 at 19:33
  • I am the op .......I don't understand what Debbie M. means by her comment , I have never used this site before and have no clue as to what I have done wrong ??
    – Gabeck
    Aug 28, 2017 at 20:43
  • Thank you , Mennyg, I will check for that site. - just looked that up and it is in a language foreign to me - I only have English , French ,German a smidgen of Spanish ..
    – Gabeck
    Aug 28, 2017 at 20:44
  • Sloppy shorthand - homebrewing.stackexchange.com
    – Ecnerwal
    Aug 29, 2017 at 1:38
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    Dear community, this is a very nice illustration of a pattern which I have seen happen frequently before - new users being unnecessarily confused by "this could also fit on X.se" type of comments. I made a meta question for this, please share your opinion: cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3402
    – rumtscho
    Aug 29, 2017 at 11:19

2 Answers 2

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This is generally an indication that the wine is not stable - that is, it is still fermenting, which is a defect in wines not intended to be sparkling (carbonated) wines.

If you made the wine, and the winery bottled it, this is your problem. If the winery made and bottled the wine, I would bring it up with them, as it's their problem, and hopefully they will replace the bulging bottles.

In making wines one either has to aim for a dry wine where all the sugars have been consumed and there is nothing more for the yeast to eat, or one "stabilizes" the wine by either filtering out all the yeast or chemically "stunning" them to prevent further fermentation when bottled. Whatever method was supposed to be applied to your wine was evidently not done properly or completely, and now fermentation is continuing in the bottles and causing gas pressure, which is pushing the corks out.

If you can't get the winery to replace the bulging bottles of wine, your best bet is to refrigerate it as cold as possible without freezing it, and drink as soon as possible.

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  • You don't need a winery to bottle wine. They sell corkers at most homebrewing stores.
    – Catija
    Aug 29, 2017 at 2:26
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    No kidding. The OP stated that a winery bottled the wine - it's just not clear from the question as written if they bottled their own wine, or if they provided a service to home winemakers who choose not to invest in a corker (which seem to cost a lot more than a capper.)
    – Ecnerwal
    Aug 29, 2017 at 2:34
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If you did not bottle yourself, and I don't think you did, Homebrewing may not be able to help a lot other than to give multiple ideas of what is happening. In truth, either @Encerwal is correct and it is still fermenting, or worse, it is simply going bad from contamination and not high enough alcohol content to stop the pathogens are the two things that quickly come to mind for me.

In either case, I would try to contact the winery. If the bottles have not been exposed to high temperatures, this should not be happening. If the wine was intended to be sparkling, it should be bottled with correct higher strength bottles and the correct, wired in corks to handle the added pressure. Even it the wine is still good, not a pathogen issue, you are in danger of pressure bursts, and a major mess on your hands.

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