My father has told me that the best wine he ever made he started in the primary, when it finished he racked the wine and added more sugar and more yeast and nutrients. he did this 8 (once a month) times before bottling. has anyone ever done this?
I have never seen a suggestion to add more nutrient and there is no reason to add more yeast but adding sugar is common and termed FEEDING the wine. It is used to get a high alcohol level. If you put all the sugar for an 18% wine in at once you may shock the yeast and it will not start. Put in enough to get 12-14% and every time it gets down to a SG of about 1.000, add a little more sugar. Eventually the yeast will hit their tolerance and quit. You can generally get 16-18% this way and sometimes higher.
Ray
I can only speak for what i have seen here, but i would have to say that you can do it, but by doing that you basicaly go back to primary fermentation. One thought that has crossed my mind is that you could probably do a primary with one style of yeast, then kill that strain, rack off, add sugar, new yeast (different type) and start the primary all over again. This is however more of a random thought off the top of my head, and would love to see someone comment on it.
Mark "Q" Tanner
"Stephen" wrote in news:nZGnb.52828$Fm2.29831@attbi_s04:
The procedure doesn't make a lot of sense to me. This is not (normal) sugar-feeding, which one does while the original yeast is still active. It's very difficult for a (new) yeast colony to grow in a high-alcohol environment, and it seems unlikely that adding sugar, yeast, and nutrients after fermentation had ended would be consistently successful, especially 8 successive months. The most likely result of such a procedure would be an extremely sweet wine --- which perhaps would be "the best wine he ever made" if someone enjoyed sweet wines. The only way I could see this working would be if the initial Brix was very low, and each successive sugar addition was small. If that were the case, one could do 8 successive fermentations.
Reminds me of a friend who carefully followed the procedure in a book on making vinegar, and ended up with "the best tasting vinegar he had ever tasted." But what he had done was start with a pasteurized commercial vinegar, and his end product was a little bit of vinegar with a lot of wine. Thus it was "the best tasting vinegar..." because it was primarily wine, not vinegar.
Slow feeding is something C.J.J. Berry describes in detail in one of his favorite recipes, peach perfection. His procedure suggests keeping it going for 7-8 months. I tried it the first time back in the 70's but in unairconditioned S. Texas where the indoor temperatures were 100 deg. F. I could not keep it going that long. It just went too fast. Now I am just too lazy to feed it slowly. I dump it all in with 2 feedings.
Ray
Thanks Ray. I just looked it up in "First Steps", and it is a very interesting recipe and technique. I may try it this summer.
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