So. Since the 2010 vintage Ive started working on the idea of expirimenting with bottle fermented wine.
This started out as some shiraz rose+second wine made with skins I made. It wasnt good enough to bottle so I decided to ferment some strawberries and peachs to give it a fruity boost and by late 2012 I hade a great floral base wine with 9% alcohol (below the 11.5% limit) and very high acidity (pH of 3.1 \ total acidity 8 g\L).
I decided to recycle some cava bottles as these cannot be purchased in small quantities here, only by the thousands per order.
Also I got the metal cages and plastic sparkling corks with bidule (yeast catching part) off ebay which took a while.
It was clear enough so I made a yeast starter with EC1118 which is a strain suitable for secondary fermentation, build it up to 5% of the total volume, mixed and started bottling.
The bottles are now undergoing secondary fermentation at 10.5 celcius and will sit on the dead yeast lees for a year. by 2014 we will have something to celebrate with
This is the result