Mango Wine

[Schatzie]

HI EVERYONE!!! hope all of you are having great day. It's a beautiful day here in Denver, in the 60's.
ok, down to biz.....My question is, after I combined all my ingredient's, before I added any acid or tannin, I took a reading 1.100
I have read so many different recipes, I am confused now. Is that a sufficient amount of sugar?.I took all the recipe's and made up my own..I'm daring!!LOL
I added 8 lbs of sugar, making 5 gallons of wine.. Need I add more sugar to bring that reading up?
My last batch of apple wine came out FANTASTIC!!. I forgot what my readings were. I'm writing it down this time. Gosh, I love making wine!!!
Without your wisdom on this site, I would never made a mighty fine wine, at least in my eyes or( taste buds) lol

Thanks for your help!!! Schatzie

 

[Boatboy24]

Hi Schatzie,

For a Mango wine, I'd say you have a little too much sugar. Were it my wine, I'd target something more in the range of 1.085 to 1.095. 1.090 should get you right around 12% ABV.

 

[Schatzie]

I'm sweet what can I say!! LOL

Thanks for the reply...as long as I am in the ballpark ,its all good. I gotta learn somehow!!

 

[WineBaker]

It`s really about How much Alcohol content you want , 1.100 is fine IMO if your wine makes it down to 1.000 you will be at 13% if it runs way Dry say at 0.985 now your at 15% I`m new but it has not taking me long to figure out when you ask WINE people 10 WINE question you will get back 11 answers 12 of which are wrong lol

 

[BernardSmith]

Yeah, Schatzie. Boatboy's comment was not about how sweet the wine will be but how much alcohol will be in the wine. I am not sure that there is a huge difference between 1.090 and 1.100 (the latter will give you an ABV of about 13% while the former will be more like 11.5- 12%. But the key point is that the more alcohol in the wine the longer you will need to age it and the more care you need to take to ensure that you avoid the production of fusel alcohols which make the wine taste harsh. The issue is not really about whether wine yeast can handle 13% alcohol. Bread yeast can handle that amount of sugar and alcohol. The issue is whether the amount of alcohol you are making (the 13%) will be balanced by the richness of the flavor from the fruit. Interestingly, you provide only the amount of sugar you added and not the amount of fruit you are using (or the amount , if any of the water you may have added (diluting the flavor of the fruit?) )...

 

[WineBaker]

Hey Bernard, If you have wine that is weak in flavor could you add a fruit juice concentrate at the time you would back sweeten it to add flavor ??

 

[Arne]

Hey Bernard, If you have wine that is weak in flavor could you add a fruit juice concentrate at the time you would back sweeten it to add flavor ??

Sure you can. And if you want to ask a question specifically to someone, go with @BernardSmith. This should give him a notification that someone has mentioned him. Arne.

 

[PhilDarby]

Schatzie, just so your aware mango wine is one of my favourate wines, however they do tend to drop quite a bit of sediment over quite long time periods, much longer than most things ive fermented (up to several months) youll also, very likely notice a lot of sediment at the bottom of your fermenting vessel, for some reason the flavour changes quite profoundly as well as it ages.

While its young it seems to retain a bit of sweetness and has mango hints, as it ages, it seems to take on characteristics of more traditional, white grape wines.

13% abv sounds ok to me here, by the way.

 

[BernardSmith]

Hey Bernard, If you have wine that is weak in flavor could you add a fruit juice concentrate at the time you would back sweeten it to add flavor ??

I agree with Arne that you CAN add fruit juice concentrate to add flavor but in my opinion, a need to add more flavor before bottling to solve a poverty of flavor suggests a problem that was created earlier. I know that this is not usual practice here (perhaps because of the Jack Keller model) but I prefer not to dilute fruit juices with water and if that means that I can make only small batches of wine then I can make only small batches. There ARE exceptions and those exceptions are because of the acidity in the fruit (and of course meads require liquid to dilute the honey to a concentration that the yeast can transport the sugars through their cell walls).

In my opinion water is needed for brewing beer and for sanitizing but water and fruit are not good bed mates. My rule of thumb is that if I would be happy drinking the fruit juice before pitching the yeast then that ought to be the strength of the juice after I pitch yeast.

 

[WineBaker]

@Arne Like this??

 

[Wiz]

Shatzie, I have been making mango wine for several years. The last batch I used 16# peeled seeded fruit for 6 gallons. I always add sugar to 1082. It always always finishes fermenting out about .992 giving me a 12.2 ABV.

 

[Arne]

@WineBaker, right on. Arne.

 

[Schatzie]

Thank you.....I added turbo YEAST and approx. 10 lbs of frozen mango and 2 quarts of 100% white grape juice and one can of frozen white grape juice in a 5 gal carboy I also puree all the mango