I am currently making a Estate Series Washington Valley Reisling white wine & am thinking about trying to make it a bit sweeter as I prefer sweeter wines. From what I've read the way to do it is to make a simple syrup & they add some to the bottle when corking it. Not knowing how sweet to make it I thought about adding varrious amounts & then marking the bottle as to how much simple syrup was added. Then I'll be able to tell which sweetness I prefer. Any ideas on how much to start with???
1 oz, 1 1/2 oz, 2 oz???? Or am I going about this the wrong way?? Any help or suggestions will be appreciated, thanks in advance...... Al
The "usual" way is to prepare the sugar syrup. Then set up about 5 glasses and pour the same amount of wine into each, say 50ml. Then add measured amounts of the syrup to each glass in linear increments - for example, nothing into 1st glass, 2ml into 2nd, 4ml into 3rd, ... , 8ml into 5th. Then taste and compare and pick the 1 you like best, that will give you the ratio of wine to syrup that you then adjust for the size of the whole batch. For ex., if the glass with 4ml of syrup tastes best, that's 50:4 = 12.5:1 ratio, so you'd need a litre of the syrup for each 12.5L of wine.
That's the basic idea, you can tweak it by either using larger wine samples or lower increments of the sugar syrup additions. You can also do a 2 stage process where you pick 2 glasses that you like best first and do a 2nd round of tasting with these as the "border glasses" and 3 new sample in between for better precision.
Also, depending on the strength of the syrup, you might have to do smaller increments than full mls.
Last caveat - the balance can change over time and also your taste preference might differ from day to day, so if you have time and a 5 gal carboy, you could actually create 5 bottle samples after the tests )assuming you're working with 6 gals) and let them age for 1-2 months and then compare. And then sweeten the 5 gal batch according to that comparison. That should give you the best result but it's more labour intensive and you need more equipment, so it might be an overkill.
I made a Gewurztraminer early this year, and also like it a bit sweeter than it turned out. I add about half a teaspoon of simple sugar to the bottle after I uncork it, and it's just fine for me. My wife likes it "as is" so I do nothing when I pop open a bottle for her. Adding it after bottling gives you a choice of what to do when you discover how the wine turns out after aging.
Pp's method will work just fine. One comment however is that, at least in my opinion, as wine ages and mellows the sweetness comes out more. If you sweeten to taste when the wine is young it may be to sweet after it ages. This is where the real art comes in. I would suggest you put in a little less than you thing you will need. Maybe 20% less.
Also, this is a great place to get your good buddies involved. Invite some friends over and let them rate the different sweetness levels. You will all have a great time. The will feel honored that you value their judgement. And when they go home you can throw away thier evluations and make it the way you like best. ;o)
Remember that a sweeter wine requires more acid and maybe more tanin to balance it. If it tastes flat after you get it to the sweetness you like, do not hesitate to add a tiny bit of acid to brighten it or a little tannin to give it a bit of bite.
i've waited 6 weeks (i'm slow & lazy) before bottling after using sparkalloid & i still got floculates. However, the finished product was extremely clear. there's only a ring of sludge on the bottom of those bottles, and no one has complained: they assume it's part of the homemade charm!
I'm actually considering not using sorbate anymore and seeing what happens with my Boun Vino on the sterile filters. Technically it shouldn't work, but the more I make these the more I agree with Tom S that sorbate is just not the right way to go.
Joe Sallustio wrote "I'm actually considering not using sorbate anymore and seeing what
Sounds like a good move Joe. My taster isn't what it used to be but I always can taste sorbate in sweetened wines. I have Presque Isle's cartridge filtration system and use 1.0 and .02 micron cartridges. Since you can't be sure downstream wine from the filter is sterile I've always added sorbate to sweetened wines even tho. I filter. I'm buying a 0.45 micron cartridge to use for sweetened wines next time I make one. From what I read 0.45 will remove yeast. Also, by the time we sweeten and bottle wines almost all yeast will be gone. Just watch...I'll probably make bottle bombs.
I've given up on sorbate too, because of the taste. I researched commercial preservatives a bit and came up with Benzoate, which is quite safe and as tasteless as you're gonna find, even as a stock solution. Since it's found naturally at high concentrations in several fruits, e.g. blueberries, it comes close to a natural preservative too. Also quite inexpensive. It's prohibited to commercial winemakers, and I seem to recall that there's some question of its interaction with citric acid, but those won't concern most home winemakers. Currently I'm testing it at 250 ppm in a small batch of sweet reserve Vignoles-Traminette. There's been no sign of renewed fermentation over a couple of months, but I'll give it more time and post tasting observations at a later time.
Mike
Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
I am not supporting the idea of bottling sweet wines without steril filtering or using sorbate, BUT, here is something that might work.
First do any fining or whatever to be sure that it is crystal clear. Then cool the wine down to a level that will definately stop all yeast. This is a good time of year for this. Then put it in a place from which you can rack without moving it and let it set for long enough to be sure it is not starting to ferment again and be sure that it is crystal clear. During this time, be sure to turn the carboy sharply several times to be sure nothing clings to the sides of the carboy. At this point all the yeast, live or dead should be on the bottom. Now rack and bottle being careful not to disturb the bottom, even if little or no sediment is visible, and only run the racking cane dow 3/4's of the way. What you bottle should be fairly safe. Now you can bottle the rest or move it to a smaller carboy. If you bottle it, mark it for early consumption.
I was only able to find a source of Sodium Benzoate, although I would have preferred the Potassium salt. Either way, the amount is quite low, and, I think, negligable. I got it from:
That's a great price - the other sources I've found were at least an order of magnitude higher, thanks for the link! I am also very interested in this because I am sensitive to sorbate in the required amount, hate its smell in wine yet at the same time am not ready to take the plunge into sterile filtration.
I could not find any data on the required amount for sodium benzoate, other than by inference from stores that offer it as a "stabilizing tablet". Does anybody have a reference that would cover this?
At the start of this experiment, I had looked it all up and found multiple references.(I got Google crazy one day.) IIRC, the doses centered around 200-300ppm. That comes out to about 250mg per liter, or
1 gram per gallon, roughly. My measurements indicate that 1/4 tsp weighs about .6 gram.
It's more effective at lower pH, so wine is well suited for its use, but it's also used on realtively non-acidic things like fresh strawberries.
Trivial data: In England, citrus soft drinks ususlly contain between
50-100ppm; in Japan, 50-200ppm, and in the Phillipenes, 20-2,000ppm. At pH 4.5, most foods are preserved by 1,000ppm, (which is the FDA's limit in the US).
Ray, Sounds interesting; I'm seriously considering building a little flash pasteurizer after reading Bird's book. He talks about a few seconds at
150 F being good enough. I could make a little control setup and stainless tubing heater assembly. I know it sounds crazy but I like tinkering, it would be pretty cool if you could make one for under $150 and I think I can...
Let me know how it works, Joe. The most critical aspect of this whole pasteurization is minimal transition times, to not get cooked flavor. This means the flash heating isn't too hard, where most pasteurizers have issues is on the cooling side. Do you have access to a soda fountain 'cold block'?.... they're pretty good at taking heat out in a hurry.
Gene, I'll look into that cold block but for a first shot at it I was just going to coil up some stainless tubing and make two little heat exchangers, one in hot water at 150F, one in ice water. If it worked any home winemaker could do it. I was considering just racking through it, although the pressure differential of a full versus mostly empty carboy requires consideration. It sounds like a decent experiment though. I can measure the temperatures of the exchangers, I have the hardware for that.
Your SS tubing will probably work fine. The cold block just has additional thermal mass which helps for short bursts of cooling. Not sure how much that extra mass will benefit you when running 5 gallons through. The SS tubing might even be better in that case, come to think of it.
A tip from making ice cream.... You might want to throw some salt (10-20 percent by weight) in your ice water to make your cold side colder, and mostly ice... just enough water to make slushy. You can get the ice solution down to low 20's (F) with salt to lower the freezing point depression at around 20% salt by weight. I know some people who cold stabilize their wine by immersing SS kegs of wine (or mostly immersing carboy) into salted ice slush at 27F using about 12 wt% salt. Just keep the salt away from your wine.
How high can you lift the carboy? 3-4 feet of additional head may give just the pressure you need. An A frame and a come-along or else an engine cherry picker might do the trick.
Back to the dosage - everything that I found for home wine specified 1 stabilizing tablet per gallon, and 1 online store listed the content of the tablet as 250mg sodium benzoate, so that would give 250ppm per gallon, or about 65-70ppm per liter. I didn't get to read the full text of the doc from your link, but form the abstract it looked like they were using the benzoate during active fermentation instead of before bottling and for a different purpose than stabilizing?
I've got some on the way from eBay so will do some lower dosage tests as well.
I see what you're saying. The beverage industry speaks of 250 mg per liter, while the hobby wine industry speaks of 250 mg per gallon, about
1/4 the amount. Unfortunately I can't find references for commercial wine stabilization, since Benzoate isn't allowed in commercial wines, which is odd, as it's the safest stuff around.
I know empirically that 250 mg per liter is effective & tasteless in my sweetened '04 Vignoles-St.Pepin, but I suppose I should also try it at
250 mg per gallon. Perhaps I'll start a gallon of sugar wine and see if
1/4 g of Benzoate can stop it.
DrinksForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.