My plan was to have some bottles of 2018 bubbly ready for Christmas. Two months ago I took 15 bottles from the cellar to start the process of riddling – getting the dead yeast cells left over from secondary fermentation into the top of the bottle. I thought I would do it an easy way and just put the bottles directly upside down into a rack, and gave them a twist every other day to help move the yeast downwards.
Although most of the yeast did settle in the cap, no matter what I did, there was always a thin deposit of yeast around the neck that just didn’t want to shift.
I have looked up how the riddling process is done traditionally and have found that they usually use additives to help the yeast settle and to stop it sticking to the glass. They also have a very specific method of twisting the bottles over a period of 3 weeks to get the yeast to move towards the cap. Who would have thought that a tried and tested method developed over hundreds of years would be better than my ‘easy method’!
It’s too late for me to add any clearing agents now, but I can at least try the traditional method of riddling. So, I have modified the rack to look like this:
And I will follow the procedure as shown here:
I have marked all the bottles with a white line so I can see what orientation they are in to help me follow the steps above. If all goes well I still might have something ready to drink by Christmas…
