Muscadine and sugar

Hi

I'm new to this forum. I have made grape wine a few times, with a little success, but I started a few muscadine vines a few years ago, and now I have muscadines. Everything I have read says to ad sugar. I have never added sugar to my grape wine and had good results. Do I need to ad sugar; or can I make with a without sugar?
If I don't ad sugar what will happen? Dry wine?

Thanks ,in advance.

You need to get yourself a refracometer to measure how much sugar is in your muscadine or get a hydrometer, this will measure your sugar pre-fermentation, during and after. You should shoot for a starting gravity around 1.080

And, welcome to WineMakingTalk

Muskadine wine

I have been making white and red Muskadine wine and all of the recipes I found said the same thing. From what I have found it seems that the juice from the muskadine grape is too acidic and it has to be diluited with water which is why you need to use sugar to get the alcohol content up to where your recipe wants it. One thing I have learned is to use only the best grapes, that is don't use any that are over ripe as they will give your wine a musky smell. Oh to answer your question if you don't add sugar you won't have very much alcohol content.

Up until now I have been getting my grapes from a vinyard and this spring they removed all of the vines and are no longer in business. I envy you, I have to find another source to make my wine now and all you will have to do is pick yours. I just tried to find the link for the recipe I've been using but can't. If you would like I'll try to put it up on here for you.

Billyrex said:

If I don't add sugar what will happen? Dry wine?

Click to expand...

Welcome to the forum!

To directly answer your question, if you do not add sugar, then the alcohol content will be lower than it would be if you did add sugar. You control the final alcohol by volume (ABV) by how much sugar is in your juice to start with.

Whether you add sugar or not, if you ferment the wine all the way, it will be dry (as opposed to sweet). If you want sweet wine, you wait until AFTER the fermentation is finished, add a stabilizer (potassium sorbate) to inhibit further fermentation, and then add sugar.