(February 14, 2012 at 2:19 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: I also plan to make some sparkling wine some time as soon as I get some champagne bottles saved up.
I found a page on the internet which has a calculator on how much priming sugar to add and what pressure it will give.
Years ago, I used to use priming sugar when bottling - I found it to be a bit of an art. Following the conventional wisdom of beer brewing at the time (bottle after you have stable SG readings over three days), it could be difficult to get consistent carbonation - as on that third day, fermentation was probably not actually complete and there was still residual fermentable sugar left. In some cases, enough to significantly overcarbonate.
I found it worked a lot better to wait for at least 3-5 days after stable SG was reached before packaging, and longer is better. As a winemaker, this is probably second nature to you.
Beer, especially from extract, is really pretty easy, best two bits of advice I know is to maintain proper sanitation, and to ferment and bottle condition longer than most instructions tell you to. Winemaking always seemed a bit mysterious to me, though now I'm learning that it really isn't all that different from beer or cider. I'm prepping to do my first batch of mead, and I'm thinking about doing a true grape wine after my apple "wine" gets packaged in a couple of months.
