Sweetening

[tcavan01]

Why is it best to sweeten your wine just before botteling? It would seem that if you sweeten it at the time of long term aging you wouldn't have to add chemicals to prevent the fermentation from restarting. Just wondering.

 

[rjb222]

The chemicals you refer to are necessary to prevent re ferment as well as to protect your wine from oxidation. I always sweeten a couple weeks before bottling to check if the batch will start to ferment again as there is never any guarantees when adding sugars of any kind that a re ferment will not occur. If you just added sugar earlier that would be a style of addition called chapilization it is a way to stretch what the yeast can do and bring extra alcohol into your wine. When doing this it is very important to keep a balance to your wine. You need big flavors for a larger alcohol to balance with.

 

[Noontime]

Even after it's done fermenting and you rack, there are still viable yeasts floating around. As soon as you add the sugar they are going to go to work and start creating alcohol and C02 again. Waiting till you've racked a couple of times means you've let most of the yeast settle and have racked off of them, diminishing the amount; then adding sorbate renders them unable to reproduce, so when you add the sugar they can't reform the colony and munch away on all that sugar.

 

[Runningwolf]

Dave, Congratulations on your 100th post!

 

[BobF]

I generally wait longer than a couple of weeks to bottle after sweetening - sometimes months if I don't need the carboy right away. Not always, but there have been times that I've had the wine throw off another fine layer of sediment after sweetening.

 

[Noontime]

Dave, Congratulations on your 100th post!

Ha Ha! I hadn't even noticed...but thank you very much.