Flavor - Strawberry wine
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Stabilize and back sweeten.
BernardSmith
Senior Member
Back sweetening as dralarms suggests may be the answer but what is the problem? What was your recipe? In particular how many pounds of strawberries did you use? Was this all in the primary? Any added fruit to the secondary? How acidic is this wine? (better than the pH, do you know the TA (titratable acidity?)
I used 9 lbs (4 kg) of fresh strawberry, 2.20 lbs (1 kg) of sugar, and I used 0.79 gallons (3 litres) of water to make 4 liters of wine in total (I thought the amount of strawberries wasn’t enough) The alcohol tolerance of the yeast I used was %15 but I started to ferment at 1.070.
BernardSmith
Senior Member
Not everyone agrees with me but you really want to use as little water as possible. Strawberries are not particularly flavor rich and adding 3/4 of a gallon of water to make 1 gallon suggests that you may have diluted the flavor to near imaginary levels. But I like the flavor of fruit more than I like the added volume that adding water might provide... The problem then may be a lack of flavor. Sweetening may help bring whatever flavor is present , forward... You don't say how acidic this wine is and that might also be part of the problem.
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I agree, if you must add liquid, use a light flavored juice or some strawberry juice. Also for a better yield freeze the fruit before use.
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I don’t know about the acidity of the wine. Actually, Scooter65 warned me it’s going to be no-water added one. I must say that I forgot his warning. Your posting and Scooter65’s warning made it more understandable that why one shouldn’t add water. I freezed the strawberries 24 hours before.
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BernardSmith
Senior Member
IMO, standard practice ought to be to use water only for cleaning. Wine making ain't brewing and fruit ain't grain. Brewers need water. Wine makers need quality fruit. You should try your very best to use only fruit for fruit wines unless there is a good reason that the fruit requires diluting. And sometimes fruit does - because the fruit as pressed or juice as expressed simply tastes too acidic or too harsh (oranges for example or cranberries). In other words, if you don't have enough juice to make the volume of wine you wanted to make you should consider (very seriously consider) reducing the volume and not diluting the flavor. Fruit itself is generally going to give you a gravity of about 1.050 (+/- 5 points) so you are anyway going to be adding about 1 lb - 1.5 lbs of sugar per gallon to increase the gravity (added water drops the gravity ) to around 1.090 but the sugar you add is for all intents and purposes tasteless... so the less sugar you need to add the more fruit forward will be the wine... The other exception might be that you are making a melomel - a honey wine (mead) with added fruit and you want the flavors of the honey to be front and center and the fruit to have only a supporting role. But again, here, you simply add less fruit (say the equivalent of 1 pint of the juice to 7 pints of the honey must or the mead, the latter if you add fruit to the secondary rather than the primary to use the alcohol in the secondary to extract flavors from the fruit)...
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