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Cincincy

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Does anyone add just a small amount of sugar after fermentation and before bottling to their wine. So that it is not as dry as it can go?
 
I am new but I think I will next time. Would 1-2 cups / 5 gal make a slight difference.. I am speaking white wine only.
Thanks
 
unlike most on here i like sweet to semi-sweet wines, and yes once my wines ferment to dry around .990 or so on your hydrometer, i then bulk age to let the lee's settle out, and let the taste enhince, then using a small amount of wine in a glass i sweeten till just short of how sweet is good tasting to me, then i check the SG to get the reading, then i sweeten the carboy till i get the same reading, an make sure as miss jujlie said add sorbate as per instrutions on package, other wise your bottles will explode, if you plan to keep aging in the bottles you can add K-META, 1/4 teaspoon per 6 gallon carboy this will help the wine age much longer while staying fresh, i can tell you nothing about kits or wines made from grappes, all my wines are made from scratch using fruits an berries, hence AKA COUNTRY WINES... although i am 1year into bulk aging my first mead, it is wild flower honey a little wild blackberries and a 1/4 ounce of stella hops, just a experiment using ingeteants off the top of my head and using a mead recipes for my steps only the iungerrtteants are thew experamental part, going to bottle next week, then give 14 days to get past bottle shock then i will try it,, you have come to the right forum. these people know their stuff,
good luck, and remember you only half to please yourself that is unless your married then you come second,, LOL,,
Dawg





UOTE=Cincincy;634432]I am new but I think I will next time. Would 1-2 cups / 5 gal make a slight difference.. I am speaking white wine only.
Thanks[/QUOTE]
 
I added some to a rose that I made last year. It is measured as a % of the volume. A sweet wine would be 1-1.5% like a white Zin.
I added .6% and it was just enough to bring out the fruitiness that I wanted. Since there are 80 cups in 5 gallons, 1 cup would give you 1.2%
 
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We like dry but think I might like just a little sweet. Have only tried one country which blueberry and I did back sweeten it about 1.004. But I know I would not like my white pinot grigio that sweet.
 
Cincincy, We also like our Reds dry, but our fruit wines are back sweetened to 1.000-008. These are Apple, Peach, Blueberry & Blackberry. The little bit of sweetening brings out the flavor & smoothes them out. Roy
 
Bench Trials - Take a cup (8 oz) make a simple syrup if you are going to use cane sugar to sweeten. (1 Cup hot water 2 Cups Sugar)
Sweeten with your simple syrup using no more that about 1/8 oz at a time. Note how much got you to just about what you like (perhaps a little dryer than perfect)
Note how much you added then - for a one gallon batch use 15 times that amount of simple syrup. (16 cups per gallon but you already sweetened one cup) Most of the time I round my number down to the next lower 1.2 oz of sweetener just to be safe. So if I needed 3.75 ozs for my gallon batch I drop that to 3.5 ozs - Since you can't un-sweeten it.
After I have sweetend the batch then I take the SG reading for my label and record keeping.

BUT BEFORE ALL THAT you should have added your K-meta and Potassium Sorbate - about a 3 days to a week before you sweeten.
I also like to let it set another week after back-sweetening just in it develops fall out or a haze. (Have a peach that got slightly hazy after sweetening but 4 weeks later it has cleared up nicely. Ready to bottle sometime in the next week.)
 
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