How To Sweeten my Wine

Hi Mike, best way to do this is to add 6 ml of Sorbitol (unfermentable sugar) for each bottle. If you are in doubt if it is too much or too little, just try and taste. Depending upon your wine, but you wille find the right amount to add, no doubt. No real trouble, great result! Ed

"Mike" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@karoo.co.uk...

You need to stabilize the wine with sorbate and sulfite. An easy job. Just add them according to instructions. Usually sorbate is added 1/2 tsp per gal. This will prevent the wine from starting ferment in the bottle after you add the sugar. Then sweeten to taste with your choice of sweetener, usually sugar or honey. Take not of the acidity as well. Sweeter wines require a higher acidity. You may have to adjust the acidity by taste as well. If it tastes kind of flat after adding the sweetener, acid is the main culprit.

Ray

You may wish to consider Stevia which is sold at health food stores. It will not ferment and a couple DROPS of the liquid form will sweeten a glass of wine. I find that adding it at drinking time to be better for me than adding prior to bottling. I have a dry pear wine that I sometimes will put in a couple drops of Stevia and there are times that I like it bone dry. By adding (or not) at drinking time, I have far better control at what suits me at the moment.

I follow Ray's method of sweetening using regular table sugar. Never tried them in wine, but most of the non-fermenting sweeteners have a disagreeable flavor to me, even at low concentrations.

The only thing I would add to Ray's advice is to make sure you do bench testing with small samples and then extrapolate to your fermenter's volume. I try to get a few people together to taste several different sweetened samples and then start tasting from unsweetened to sweeter and sweeter, then have people vote on which sample was best. With a Riesling a few weeks ago 4 of us actually agreed on the same sample as being best. Amazing!

It won't ferment immediately, but it doesn't seem suited for long-term storage. It can eventually break down into a fermentable sugar. See Jack Keller's entry:

Of course, I welcome any evidence to the contrary. I've been wanting to use this herb for a long time in my homebrew, and would love to hear some 2-or-3-years-down-the-road success sotries.

-- WB

I have heard that "Splenda" can break down and eventually may re-ferment as it is made from sugar. Ray Calvert who posts here on this news group even called the company and I think the result was that they could not say what would happen with Splenda and did not encourage its use for long term.

It is my understanding that "Stevia" is not a "sugar" to begin with. There was an article in "Winemaker Magazine" about it. Here is a link that talks about it some. You will need to scroll down the where it talks about sweeteners. Would appreciate comments from others who may have used it for bottled wine as opposed to just using it at drinking time. It does not sound as if Jack has documented results from long term storage.