Stablizing before completely dry?

I have always taken my fruit wines down to below 1.00 SG, back sweetening if needed. Recently someone had told me to stop it earlier to keep more flavor of the fruit and omit the need of back sweetening. They were also were against any malolactic fermentation for the fruit wine, saying it imparts a yeasty taste. I've always encouraged it. Thoughts?

I contend that there is not really a feasible way for the home winemaker to stop an active fermentation. How do you propose to do it? Sorbate does not kill yeast, it just stops them from asexual reproduction (budding).

Sour_grapes, if one had the means, could you not cold crash the wine for a week or so, rack off cake and stabilize?

I suspect that most folk who talk about stopping the fermentation in mid-stream use heat to pasteurize the wine and so kill the yeast. Quite apart from the risk of exploding bottles I suspect that while applying heat to fruit is wonderful when you make jam I am not convinced that it brings out the best in wines.

brottman said:

Sour_grapes, if one had the means, could you not cold crash the wine for a week or so, rack off cake and stabilize?

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Cold does not kill yeast. After all, they have evolved in the presence of winter!

brottman said:

Sour_grapes, if one had the means, could you not cold crash the wine for a week or so, rack off cake and stabilize?

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If that wine ever gets warm again, you'll have bottle bombs. And maybe even if it doesn't get warm.

I was successful with a batch of skeeter. When it dropped to the sweetness I wanted .5 brix or do, I filtered 4-5X with .5 micron (close as I could get to .45 micron). Then let it age another few months in the carboy, to see if there was any more activity. With none, I sorbated, bottled. Guarantee that I won't have problems, no, but good enough for me.

But that kind of filter is (I think) smaller than the size of a yeast cell. In other words, filtering with such fine filters ought to remove just about 100 percent of the yeast.

You know when the filter is that fine, one would wonder how much flavor you are also filtering out. Why not backsweeten, it is not that difficult of a thing to do.

BernardSmith said:

But that kind of filter is (I think) smaller than the size of a yeast cell. In other words, filtering with such fine filters ought to remove just about 100 percent of the yeast.

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Yup, that is the idea of sterile filtration. In my post (#2), I said "not really feasible" because I think that most home winemakers don't have the means and/or ability to carry this out. I can easily believe NorCal is "above average!"


Julie, although I agree with you regarding backsweetening, flavor molecules are much, much, much smaller than yeast

ou8amaus said:

I know there are a few that will disagree with me, but I filter all my wines down to 1 micron, whites and reds. Most commercial vineyards go down to almost .5 to achieve a sterile filter... I remember hearing once that flavour molecules compared to sterile filter is like throwing a ping pong ball through soccer netting. In other words flavour molecules much too small to get caught in any filter we could do at home.

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sour_grapes said:

Not bad, but not dramatic enough. If the "flavor molecules" are the size of a ping pong ball, the gaps in the filter would be more like the distance BETWEEN THE SOCCER GOALS (on opposite ends of the soccer pitch).

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NorCal said:

I was successful with a batch of skeeter. When it dropped to the sweetness I wanted .5 brix or do, I filtered 4-5X with .5 micron (close as I could get to .45 micron). Then let it age another few months in the carboy, to see if there was any more activity. With none, I sorbated, bottled. Guarantee that I won't have problems, no, but good enough for me.

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You sorbated. So with sufficient SO2, you shouldn't have had any issues, even without the filtering.

Boatboy24 said:

You sorbated. So with sufficient SO2, you shouldn't have had any issues, even without the filtering.

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Yeah, but if he had NOT filtered, the wine would not have remained sweet for the months before he added the sorbate (I predict).

sour_grapes said:

Yeah, but if he had NOT filtered, the wine would not have remained sweet for the months before he added the sorbate (I predict).

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Ah, good point. I agree.

Sorbate and filtering is also used by the person who explained the process to me. Once it reached the desired sweetness level, sulphite is added, stir, add sorbate and stir again. I noticed some definite action in the carboy, even after the 2nd degassing. Once sufficient degassing has happened, clearing is done. However, I could see that many of the said wines were not clearing properly - assuming they weren't sufficiently degassed? This just sounds like so much extra work to me.....

HarvestWine said:

Sorbate and filtering is also used by the person who explained the process to me. Once it reached the desired sweetness level, sulphite is added, stir, add sorbate and stir again.

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You first say that filtering is part of the process, but then do not refer to it in your description of the steps. Are you talking about sterile filtration or not?

sour_grapes said:

You first say that filtering is part of the process, but then do not refer to it in your description of the steps. Are you talking about sterile filtration or not?

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Filtering was done as the last step before bottling. It would be regular filtering, removing of larger particles and clearing the wine. The person who I'm referring to filters with regular water filters. Again, not the process I've used as I use only filters made for wine. I assume the two would be quite different.