Thoughts on sweetening wine

Personally I tend to use commercal wine conditioner. However, I haven't been making fruit wines, and I don't sweeten much.

If you do use wine conditioner, add potassium sorbate to the wine first unless you add AT LEAST the minimum listed on the bottle (usually 15ml of wine conditioner per litre). The conditioner contains sorbate but not enough unless the minimum is added.

Some folks use apple juice, sugar, or a simple sugar solution. If you use any of these, you must add potassium sorbate to prevent fermentation starting up again.

If adding immediately prior to bottling I would definitely use the commercial wine conditioner. The others may result in cloudiness or sediment.

Steve

Another option is to bottle your wine as is and make a simple syrup of one part water to 1 part sugar and 'back-sweeten'. Back sweetening is a technique where the sugar is added to either the bottle or glass after opening, not before bottling.

There are some advantages there, your wine is stable because it's dry and by adding the sugar as you open each bottle you can experiment with differing levels of sweetness to find the level you really like. It also allows each person to fine tune the wine right in the glass. Since it's your first you will be able to try differing levels over time too because wine changes with time. Once you settle on a value it's just basic math for next time if you want to pre-sweeten. Most of the changes occur in the first year and are almost always for the better.

Fruit wines are often drunk young depending on the style. Lower alcohol wines are not protected by the alcohol so are usually drunk at less than a year old, the lower alcohol (

I agree with your procedure.

I use liquid "Stevia" at drinking time which is a sweetener made from a natural herb whenever I want a sweeter wine.

I have one planted in my herb garden but is is much easier just to go to a health food store that sells it. As little as a drop is enough to sweeten most wines. There is even a liquid "Chocolate Stevia" which is great.

Again a drop in a glass of red wine is enough to both sweeten and had a hint of chocolate to your wine. I do not do this very much but it works wonders in salvaging a "not so good" wine

I sometimes make cream pear wine by adding some pear syrup to the batch after fermentation is complete. I add it to the carboy and put in some sorbate at the same time. I then let the carboy sit for another few weeks to make sure that fermentation hasn't started up again.

Paul