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Winexpert Wine Wand - Wine Degasser and Mixer. Winexperts Wine Whip - The Answer to Degassing. Remember the movie The Hunt for Red October? Sean Connery, a Russian sub commander with a bizarre Scottish lisp, has a problem when the submarines propellers spin too suddenly and huge gouts of bubbles come off them, showing up clearly on the sonar of the enemy ships. If you ever wondered where the bubbles came from underwater, it wasnt actually air or oxygen: it was steam. The propellers moved fast enough to flash the water at the tip of the prop into vapour (tip vortex cavitation), which expanded to form bubbles which subsequently collapsed, hammering the water and triggering the sonar images. In wine, this hammering effect also blasts dissolved gases out of solution, including CO2 gas, a bonus that gets rid of the fizzies much faster. Many people find it difficult to stir strongly enough to get all of the fizzies, out, especially if they have some issues with upper body strength, or your grip. There are several models of stirring whip, but they are all essentially a long rod with a hook, a set of paddles or fingers on the end that goes into the wine, and a shank that fits into a drill. The problem with most of them is that the paddles or fingers are too short to take advantage of tip-vortex cavitation because they never get up to a speed which can cause the vaporization that makes it so effective. The Wine Whip, with its long prongs achieves this easily, with the bonus that its nearly indestructible in normal use. Once the whip is sanitized, its easy to use. You secure the shank in the chuck of a 3/8ths drill, stick the business end into your wine (you need to hold the prongs together to get them into the carboy) and pull the trigger to stir with a lot of vigour. It helps, however to use a little finesse. 1) Place the head of the Wine Whip all the way to the bottom of the vessel and give the drill a one to two-second stir. If the wine is heavily saturated with carbon dioxide and very foamy, this will give you a chance to test the waters without decorating the ceiling with Cabernet if you charge in full-bore you might get a violent evolution of CO2. When youre sure its safe, proceed with full-speed stirring. 2) Next, read the fining/stabilizing procedures. Wherever they direct you to stir, use the drill in one direction, clockwise or counter-clockwise for sixty seconds, at full speed. 3) When they require you to make the next addition and stir again, change the direction of the drill and go for another sixty seconds, until all the additions are in. Thats it. With three one-minute stirrings you can fully de-gas a batch of wine without any further intervention. However, there are a couple of things to note here. CO2 saturation is a tricky business, and depends on two factors. First, CO2 is soluble in a liquid solution in inverse proportion to the temperature of that solution. In other words, colder wine will hold more gas, and be harder to stir well enough to get all the fizz out. Keep your wine at the upper end of the specified temperature range (65 - 75 F, 18 - 24 C) and youll have a much easier time of it. Second, barometric pressure can play a large role in degassing. This may sound surprising, but if you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. The barometric pressure is a measurement of the weight exerted on everything by the column of air above us. We actually swim around at the bottom of a sea of air sixty miles deep, and sometimes the pressure of that air is higher, and sometimes lower. If the pressure is high, as it often is on bright, sunny days and clear nights, the CO2 in your wine will be highly compressed, and will want to stay in solution as opposed to coming out as a bubble of gas. On the other hand, if the pressure is low, like a on a cloudy, rainy or overcast day, the gas will be able to come out of solution much more rapidly, with less stirring.
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