Sorbate?

[Dufresne11]

Hello All,

I have made 1 kit and about 6 or 7 buckets of wine in my two year experience as a winemaker. I just started my first "country" wine experiment. Well sort of... I am making hard lemonade. As such this is my first experience with sorbate.

I understand what sorbate does. I just don't understand why I don't use it when I make wine from the buckets of juice. Is it because I let the wine ferment to dry but not the hard lemonade (which I am going to be backsweetening). So the hard lemonade will have sugar in it but my wine doesn't??

 

[Wade E]

You only use sorbate when adding more sugar after fermentation is complete and stable otherwise it will start to ferment all over again. There are 2 other methods instead of using sorbate. One is expensive and that is to sterile filter your wine after it has stabilized by using a .45 absolute micron filter. The other is to make enough abv so as to overcome your yeasts abv toleration level and that probably wouldnt taste good with this lemonade and will make it need much more aging to mellow out.