The Purpose of Neck Freezers for Winemaking
When making wine, you must proceed through all the stages in the proper fashion to reap favourable results. Disgorging is one of these stages of which we speak and it removes the sediment that accumulates during the riddling process. Winemakers utilise neck freezers to accomplish this task in the ideal manner.
Definition of the Riddling Process
When the maturation process comes to an end, the yeast produces or lees sediment. Even though you leave this for the second fermentation to take place, you must remove it in the riddling process. You place the bottles at a steep angle in a specially designed rack. The sediment that the yeast lees settles in the necks of the bottles. Once this stage is complete, you perform the disgorging with the help of neck freezers after you taste the wine to check the sweetness. This will tell you if you need to add any liqueur d’expedition when you top off the bottles after the disgorging stage.
The Disgorging Process
To begin the disgorging process, you place the bottles upside down in special neck freezers that bathe the necks with a cooling bath of between minus 24-degrees and 30-degrees Celsius. This bath freezes the wine and sediment just in the neck of the bottles. At the end of this process, you can remove the crown cap, and the ice-sediment plug will actually shoot out of the bottle once the cap is off the bottle. Replace the plug with wine or a wine and liqueur d’expedition mixture. The level of sweetness will vary depending upon the type of wine or champagne you are making. We are simplifying this step a bit, but you get our meaning. Replace the crown caps with the final corks.
Examples of Neck Freezers
For the best results with disgorging, select the model of neck freezer that can handle your typical batch size. The following are the Champagel models of neck freezers that are available at our company of Grapeworks Consumables:
- 2000 bottles per hour linear model
- 3000 bottles per hour linear model
- 3500 bottles per hour linear model
- 6000 bottles per hour linear model
- R 150 rotary model
Contact us for further details and pricing on our models of neck freezers. They are invaluable for the disgorging process today since they automate it for you in an effective, quality manner. Also, allow us to supply all of your winemaking needs for supplies, machines and equipment. We can set you up with everything that you require to ensure that your winemaking is successful.