MAKING SWEET WINES

Making your wines sweet is a deceptively simple and straight forward

process. But, because there always seems to be a few questionable

recipes or ideas flying around for making a sweet wine, I decided to go

over some of the basics. Hopefully this will clear up some of the confusion

and misconceptions surrounding this process.


- Basic Process

The first thing that needs to be understood is that any sugar you add at

the beginning of a fermentation should have nothing to do with how sweet

your wine will turn out. This sugar is added simply for the wine yeast to

turn into alcohol.

The "Potential Alcohol Scale" that is on almost all wine making hydrometers

is used to verify that the correct amount of sugar is being added to obtain

the alcohol percentage you desire. If the fermentation goes as planned,

the wine will be dry (without sugar) or close to dry when done fermenting,

but more importantly, at the specific alcohol level you intended.

Sweetening can then be added to the wine to taste. A stabilizer such as

Potassium Sorbate should also be added at this time to inhibit any re-

fermenting that the new sugars may unintentionally feed. By adding your

beginning sugar in this way and then sweetening later on, you gain

complete control over both the wine's sweetness and its final alcohol level.

Now granted, if you add more sugar to the fermentation than the wine

yeast can handle, the remaining sugars will contribute toward the wine's

sweetness. This would be alright except that quite often the wine ends up

too sweet for most peoples taste with no way of correcting it. Secondly, if

a stabilizer is not added to wines prepared in this way, they may decide to

ferment again, sometimes even several months after being bottle. This

can be an equation for a big mess.

The highest level of alcohol I would ever depend on obtaining from the

initial sugars added to a fermentation is 13%, and that's assuming you

have a healthy, vigorous fermentation. Shooting for alcohol levels that are

beyond this is possible, but always in question.

So as you might start to see, piling on the sugar at the beginning of

fermentation, in reality, gives you little control over how sweet the wine is

actually going to be.


- What To Sweeten With?

This first thing that needs to be pointed out is that anytime you add sugar

to a wine for sweetening and the fermentation is complete, it is of great

importance that you add a wine stabilizer such as "Potassium Sorbate" at

the same time. Otherwise, the newly added sugars can potentially make

the wine re-ferment causing it to become dry tasting all over again.

Sweetening your wine with regular store-bought cane sugar is perfectly

okay and is what most people use. But, I though I would mention some

other ideas that have been used successfully by some other home wine-

makers and myself.

- Corn Sugar in not quite as sweet as cane sugar you buy from the store,

but seems to give the wine a more crisp, cleaner flavor. This would be a

good choice for most white wines or more generally, wines with a lighter,

more delicate flavor.

- Rice Syrup has even a cleaner flavor than Corn Sugar. It imparts a

character that can almost be described as minty. This would be a great

choice for Sauvignon Blanc or maybe even an apple wine.

- Honey can also be a be used to sweeten your wine. For example, use

raspberry honey to sweeten a raspberry wine. Very effective.

- We also offer a Wine Conditioner that makes sweetening your wine very

simple. It is a heavy syrup with stabilizer already incorporated into it. You

just add to taste.

- Juice concentrates quite often are appropriate as a sweetener and will

also enhance the wine's flavor. Also, consideration should be given to the

fact that the wine's acid level will be increased by the natural acids in the

concentrate.

- Fresh Fruit Juices can be used in the same way as concentrate. Grape,

apple, pear all work very well. Fresh fruit juice is quite often the best

choice when sweetening harsher wines such as elderberry.

- Artificial Sweeteners need to be mention here as a precaution. Sweet-

eners such as Equal and Sweet 'N Low do not bond well on their own with

liquids. Pop manufacturers use binders to keep these artificial sweet-

eners suspended. If added to a wine that has been stored these types of

sweeteners will need to be stirred up off the bottom before serving.

By all means experiment. If you have a 5 gallon batch, take off a

measured quart and add a measured amount of sweetener of your

choice to it. I you like the results, multiply your efforts to the rest of the

batch. If not, pour it back in with the rest and start all over.