Crabapple wine ready for racking?

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Andre

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Hi everyone!

I started this wine a couple weeks ago, and posted about it:

http://www.winemakingtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4331

The comments in that post freaked me out due to the sugar content, so I added 250 ml grape concentrate and 500ml water. The SG was 1024 then.

It is now 12 days later, and I just took an SG reading of 992. This seems to be quite low, and would suggest fermentation has completed? The "popping" referred to in the previous post has slowed down to one every 10 seconds or so. There is now about 2 inches of sediment sitting in the bottom on my secondary fermenter (been there around 4 days).

The step I'm on in my recipe is super useful: "Ferment to dryness, then rack". Am I at dryness now? :)

Thanks!
 
At .992 its dry. What action you see now is gas escaping. Rack and leave the lees behind.
Slowly degas it, wait a week then if the hydrometer stays the same .992 or lower than you can start to add your finnings.
 
Sweet! Thanks Tom!

I will rack today. Just looking at the numbers again, and it looks like the SG was pretty low after I diluted it. What do you think about adding more sugar now and fermenting again?
 
Rack, add sulfites and ascorbic acid and sorbate if you plan on sweetening eventually and then degass. Apple wine is 1 of the most vulnerable wines to browning and is why I recommend the ascorbic acid to prevent this along with the sulfites.
 
Hi everyone!

Thanks everyone for their advice so far. I'm not sure what to say about what happened tonight, but in the end, I think I diluted the wine way too much.

I bought a bottle of wine (cheap, but one I like) to use for topping up the carboy, but I didn't take into account just how much sediment there was. I have read that you should keep limited air space in the carboy (specially for apple wines, due to oxidation?), so to top up the wine to about one inch of the air lock (my secondary is a plastic cuboid) I had to add about 4 wine bottles of water on top of my bottle of wine that I added. The S.G. was 992 when the racking was complete, so I added some sugar with the water and the current S.G. is 1000. I am following a recipe book which said to rack the wine and rack again in 2 weeks if a sediment appears, but did not mention anything about stabilizing the wine. Sticking to the recipe, I added 5 Campden tablets, and replaced the air lock.

The wine had this really nice pink color before racking, and now it looks like watered down apple juice *sighs*.
 

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