Salvaging my beginner mistakes
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Pectic enzyme breaks down pectin to eliminate pectin haze, and in the process breaks down cell walls which enable more color and body extraction, and to get more liquid from the pulp.Pectic enzyme will release more simple sugars right? Could be counter intuitive since I was diluting, so to lower sugar content?
I add pectic enzyme to all fruit wines as a preventative.
So, I had some people more experienced than me taste the wine from my small containers. I was having low expectations. I had watered down that wine a bit according to the previous calculations. It is effectively a "dessert wine" in terms of sweetness. This wine was hazy, since it hadn't been clarified. But they could not stop drinking it, except to give praise!
They ended up drinking two bottles of the stuff. I also liked the taste myself.
Because of this positive result, I decided the best plan would be to not bother fermenting my smaller carboys further. Instead, I racked them and begun clarifying them today. That way I can bottle them in a week or two, to free them up for diluting my larger batches. (and add yeast starters to the larger batches after diluting).
I added sorbate to the small carboys, to prevent bottle bombs later. I added sulfite with the sorbate as per instruction to prevent geranium smells developing.
I haven't diluted these small carboys yet, as I have no space, I have to wait and do it when bottling. But that extra water will lower the alcohol and the wine will also still have about 8% sugar content: an environment viable for yeast. Will this sorbate really prevent such wine from fermenting in the bottles?
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If you're happy with the wine as it is, cool! The nice thing about making your own wine is you can make it as pleases you.
However, you do not want to bottle yet. Do yourself a favor and give the wine another couple of months. While wine can be bottled immediately after fermentation, giving it more time in bulk may help greatly with ensuring consistency between bottles. Plus even with clarification via fining agents, wine can still drop some sediment later.
If you have zero activity, the addition of sorbate + K-meta will prevent a renewed fermentation. Sorbate on its own is not guaranteed to prevent a renewed fermentation.
However, you do not want to bottle yet. Do yourself a favor and give the wine another couple of months. While wine can be bottled immediately after fermentation, giving it more time in bulk may help greatly with ensuring consistency between bottles. Plus even with clarification via fining agents, wine can still drop some sediment later.
If you have zero activity, the addition of sorbate + K-meta will prevent a renewed fermentation. Sorbate on its own is not guaranteed to prevent a renewed fermentation.
I have zero activity now in the undiluted carboys that I stabilized. But if I dilute with water in the future, couldn't that cause the yeast to become active again? Since that will lower the alcohol and allow the yeast to ferment?
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Sorbate + K-meta is birth control for yeast, and AFAIK, it's permanent if the correct dosage is used. I and many other people have successfully used the combination to backsweeten wine. Diluting the wine later will not affect it.
So, I made a yeast starter a couple days ago by dissolving a bag of strong wine yeast with 2dL water and slowly adding wine at 0.5dL intervals over a day, until I had added 4.5dL of my diluted wine to it. I had it sitting in a dark spot inside a glass jar with the lid loosely screwed for about 1.5 days until foaming peaked. Then I added it into one of my 6-gal carboys (which I had diluted with water to lower the sugar and alcohol content for the yeast). No sulfite in that carboy. I did add pectic enzyme though. It has been two days since adding the starter and the carboy is bubbling a bit now, hopefully it will ferment away a bit more of the sugar. I will report the results later on.
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