New to the wine making concept

[Bahamawine1]

Hello new wine maker here

I’m from the Bahamas and started making some native fruit wine and I love asking questions. I hope that I can find many of those answers here from you pros?

First question what’s the safest way to produce sweet wine without back sweetening?

 

[Ajmassa]

hey- welcome to your new obsession!
The only thing i can think of is just overloading the sugar higher than your yeast’s tolerance. So that the yeast will max out before all the sugar is fermented leaving residual sugar. But that’s probably difficult to hit a target sweetness accurately. And most fruit wines would be outta balance with a high abv i think. But i guess you could select a yeast with an abv tolerance around what you’d want. then crunch your numbers to figure out how much sugar is needed to hit your sweetness target.
fermcalc is awesome for this type of number crunching.

i guess that would be the safest way to do it. but backsweetening let’s you have precision when dialing in sweetness later while also not forcing a high abv maxing out the yeast. just need to utilize sorbate so you don’t blow up your basement by accident. I don’t do fruit wines tho. ill bet some other people on the forum will have some quality advice for ya about this.

 

[winemaker81]

Following on @Ajmassa's post, I can think of 5 ways to produce a sweet wine:

1) ferment the wine dry, stabilize, and backsweeten. This produces whatever ABV is desired and the residual sugar is whatever the maker desires. This is the recommended solution as it has no drawbacks.

2) add spirits (brandy, vodka, Everclear, etc.) during fermentation to increase the ABV above the level the yeast can survive. This produces (more or less) a port wine of high ABV, although fermentation will not stop instantly so achieving the desired residual sugar may not work.

3) use a low potency yeast and start with more sugar than the yeast can survive. This can produce a lower ABV than #2, but yeast potency is not an exact value, so the ABV may be different from what is desired, and the residual sugar may not be what is desired.

4) ferment the wine to the desired residual sugar and sterile filter to remove the yeast. Commercial wineries sometimes do this for dessert wines. The drawbacks are you'll be filtering fermenting wine and will plug up the filters fairly quickly as filters available for home winemaking are for polishing. There is also a question if the "sterile" filters available for home winemakers adequately do the job.

5) use a commercial centrifuge. A local brewery uses that to clear their beers. Getting access to one is probably impossible.

The advice generally given on this forum is to use #1, since you are in control of the outcome. #2 and #3 work fine when you have many barrels of wine and can blend to achieve the desired result. When making a single carboy, not so much.

What is your reason to not backsweeten?

 

[Michael T]

Which native fruits do you have access to? If you can get lemons, you could make 'out-of-this-world' skeeter pee.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Welcome to WMT!

@Ajmassa and @winemaker81 have good, practical answers for home winemakers looking at sweetening. In addition;
* heat over 45C/ 45 minutes will kill yeast, long term heat at 37C also will kill
* time, a year long term storage is one I like to use.
* a traditional French method is to make vin roux naturals is to rack or centrifuge to remove nitrogenous material (like yeast cells) so there isn’t enough nitrogen to grow yeast
* pH below 2.9 will do it and if you are running high residual sugar may balance the flavor better, example colas made with phosphoric acid are about pH 2/ 0.2% TA with 10% sugar.
* high pressure CO2 will kill all micro
* Sulphite is another barrier, if you run high as 80ppm combined with above or potassium sorbate Ajmassa suggested.

Wine is several selective fences that prevent refermentation, example the pH requirement is less if combined with 14% alcohol and with no alcohol we can start a cranberry or skeeter pee at pH 2.9. Because it is SEVERAL fences the system is complicated and there will be more than one way to do it. ,,,, Note the required sorbate level is reduced as the alcohol percentage increases.

 

[Bahamawine1]

Here in the Bahamas we typically drink more sweet wine than dry.

Following on @Ajmassa's post, I can think of 5 ways to produce a sweet wine:

1) ferment the wine dry, stabilize, and backsweeten. This produces whatever ABV is desired and the residual sugar is whatever the maker desires. This is the recommended solution as it has no drawbacks.

2) add spirits (brandy, vodka, Everclear, etc.) during fermentation to increase the ABV above the level the yeast can survive. This produces (more or less) a port wine of high ABV, although fermentation will not stop instantly so achieving the desired residual sugar may not work.

3) use a low potency yeast and start with more sugar than the yeast can survive. This can produce a lower ABV than #2, but yeast potency is not an exact value, so the ABV may be different from what is desired, and the residual sugar may not be what is desired.

4) ferment the wine to the desired residual sugar and sterile filter to remove the yeast. Commercial wineries sometimes do this for dessert wines. The drawbacks are you'll be filtering fermenting wine and will plug up the filters fairly quickly as filters available for home winemaking are for polishing. There is also a question if the "sterile" filters available for home winemakers adequately do the job.

5) use a commercial centrifuge. A local brewery uses that to clear their beers. Getting access to one is probably impossible.

The advice generally given on this forum is to use #1, since you are in control of the outcome. #2 and #3 work fine when you have many barrels of wine and can blend to achieve the desired result. When making a single carboy, not so much.

What is your reason to not backsweeten?

 

[Bahamawine1]

Actually I hit the ground running I have a number of wines going the same time just invested in 20 5 gallon Carboys and ten fermenting buckets. So I’ve done a skeeter, dragon blood, fever grass, sapodilla, tamarind, hog plum, pineapple and in the process of started our native small mangoes.

Which native fruits do you have access to? If you can get lemons, you could make 'out-of-this-world' skeeter pee.

 

[winemaker81]

Here in the Bahamas we typically drink more sweet wine than dry.

I figured you want sweet wine, but you didn't give a reason for not backsweetening. Does my explanation of the sweetening methods make sense?

 

[BernardSmith]

The dirty little secret in the US is that despite what people SAY they tend to BUY sweeter wines than dry wines. And if you make country wines (wines from fruit other than grapes) then you do really need to back sweeten the wine to bring forward the fruit flavors. BUT technically, "back sweetening" was not traditionally about adding sugar to the wine before bottling. It was about adding unfermented juice of the fruit you were fermenting and that still required that you prevent the yeast still in solution from treating the sugars in the fruit as material for them to ferment. Sorry, but chemical stabilization is basically the only technique that home winemakers can effectively use (pasteurization = cooking the wine and cooked wine tastes like cooked wine... )

 

[Bahamawine1]

It makes a whole lot of sense, I’ve read about the explosion from continued fermenting.

I figured you want sweet wine, but you didn't give a reason for not backsweetening. Does my explanation of the sweetening methods make sense?