Hi Paul

Both of these problems are caused by inadequate head space
in the bottle. When a long cork is fully seated, there should be
~3/4 inch of head space remaining between the bottom of the
cork and the top of the wine. I have a friend that actually made
up a gauge for checking this until he had enough experience to
do it by "eye ball". HTH Happy holidays !!

"Pavel314" > wrote in message
...
> I finally got around to bottling the final gallon of grape/elderberry wine
> that's been sitting in my small oak keg for several months. I've been
> topping it off all along and it tasted great. Unfortunately, when I was
> corking the five bottles, one shattered. When you only make five bottles,
> losing one is a 20% loss ratio. In reviewing my notes on this batch, when
I
> bottled the other two gallons of this wine straight from the secondary
> several months back, one of those bottles broke, also.
>
> I have a bench corker and soaked the corks for about ten minutes before
> corking. This is my usual soak as if I let them soak too long, they are
too
> limp to force through the neck of the corker and end up with mushroom
heads
> protruding above the bottle neck.
>
> All of the bottles were originally from commercially bought wine which
came
> with corks, not screw tops, so the bottles were made for corking. Also,
I'd
> used all five previously at least once for my home brews. I'm wondering if
> maybe my mechanical home corker puts more stress on the bottles than does
a
> commercial corker. Maybe I should throw the bottles out after one round of
> corking for homebrew? I hate to waste good bottles, but I'd rather throw
out
> a half dozen bottles than lose a bottle of a special brew, as I did today.
>
> Any similar experiences, comments, or theories?
>
>
> Paul
>
>