How can fermentation break glass if there’s no increase in matter in the bottle?

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I’m thinking of like when you bottle wine that’s still fermenting, and it explodes. I understand that the fermentation process raises the air pressure inside the bottle. What I *don’t* understand is how? When you pump air into a balloon, the air pressure rises because there are *more* air molecules entering the balloon.

With wine in a bottle, you have a fixed amount of matter at a certain temperature. I don’t understand how fermentation could increase air pressure in a closed system?

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A kilo of lead takes up a little space. A kilo if air takes up a whole lot of space. Fermentation turns parts of the wine (carbon) from something thats more like lead (dense sugar) to something more like air (not very dense CO2). So even though theres the same amount of mass, some of it now wants to take up a lot more space. If you seal it up inside a bottle with nowhere for it to go…… KABOOM

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