Something odd happened this evening. I heard a bang in the hall and went to see whether herself had come home or the cat had done something. The cat was sitting on a surface looking curiously towards a wine bin under a coat rack, below which a pool of liquid was spreading. The foil-wrapped neck of a bottle of some sort of Italian pink bubble was lying on the floor with shards of glass. Initially inclined to blame the cat, I soon saw that nothing heavy enough to do the damage was lying on the floor. The bottle had simply exploded.
The hall isn't heated and anyway the bottle has been there all summer, so temperature alone doesn't explain it. But the bottle apart from the top of the neck isn't the sort of robust thick vessel normally used for champagne. I've just measured a shard from the belly of the bottle - where it curves in towards the neck - and it is just barely over a sixteenth of an inch thick, well under three thirty-seconds. It could have hurt someone if that had happened as they shook the bottle a bit while opening it, as one does.
Watch out for Italian pink. Judging by what people here generally go for it won't necessarily have been cheapo either. I don't much like it myself.
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Worth taking the bottle back to the retailer, not in a demanding-compensation way but at least to give them a chance to replace it and to determine whether there's a wider safety concern with a certain batch of bottles.
We like a drop of prosecco from time to time. It's only gently sparkling, so it comes in what seems like a standard bottle with a cork that has to be corkscrewed out. Still more than 2mm thick, though, I'd say.
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Happened to me but with a bottle of red which was happily standing on the worktop in the kitchen. Co-op refunded and paid for the kitchen to be redecorated.
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Was the bottle marked such as to confirm that it complied with the relevant British Standard for strength and durability? I suspect that it wasn't. You get what you pay for. Next time you buy a bottle of wine you would be well advised to inspect the bottle for the British Standard marking.
www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Make%20or%20break.pdf
tinyurl.com/csqbs66
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Home-brew was it?
I heard a story of someone whose barrel of bubbling brew exploded just as the taxi driver rang to take the family to their holiday flight. No time to mop up, so they just left it, as the mess seeped across the hall and out of the door.
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The L'escargot weekly shop must be exciting and inspiring.....
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wonder if they do bottles with heating elelments :0
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>> Was the bottle marked such as to confirm that it complied with the relevant British
>> Standard for strength and durability? I suspect that it wasn't.
In which case it shouldn't have been on sale, should it?
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It was italian wine. No bottle of wine contains the markings for every local export market standard, nor is it a legal requirement, there is a common € mark.
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 16 Oct 12 at 10:44
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I had never heard of this happening and it is of great public concern, hence needs publicizing.
A (so far) very docile, very light Italian pink is Pasqua Rosato, Veneto, £6.99 from Majestic, if two are bought.
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Useful tip L'Es. In future I shall avoid the Chateau bottled staff in those dangerous foreign bottles and go for the British wine.
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Drink it AC - a whole bottle of wine sitting for a week ! ?
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Please go for English wine. Not British wine.
There is a world of difference!
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When I was a kid, we made our own ginger beer. One bottle used was a very heavy cider bottle and one night, it went bang.
As it did so in the kitchen, and the dog slept there, and was even scared of the word 'bang', let alone a real one, not only was there a good mess in the morning, but a still shaking dog.
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The first time I made Elderflower Champagne (24 bottles of!) I re-used Wine bottles. They were o.k for months, but the first time we turned the C/H on, it was like the gunfight at the O.K Coral with water pistols! - now I use the 2litre "pop" bottles that don`t!
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Fizzy Italian wine? It's all glorified Lambrusco isn't it?
Get a grip, you lot...
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Takes me back to my childhood, when Sunday lunch in the kitchen was interrupted several time by dads home brewed elderberry wine exploding. This was the early 70s, and Sunday was the only day the kitchen got warm enough as coke for the central heating was hard to come by.
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Exploding wine bottle - WillDeBeest
