Peach wine too strong!

[Donatelo]

December 8th I started 6 gallon batch of peach wine , The SG jumped up to 1.100. and is now .988. Which gives me an alcohol by volume of 14.70%. This is way too high. I wanted a abv of around 10-11 %. How do I lower the alcohol content and make a lite summer wine? Can I just add a volume of peach nectar? or how do I back sweeten this?

 

[salcoco]

set up a bench trial; first wait until wine is clear and aged about two months make a sugar syrup two cup sugar to one cup hot water mix in a blender. wait until cool. obtain 1/4 cup(60ml) samples of wine,
add 1/4 tsp(1.25ml) of syrup to first, 2 times this to second , three times this to third etc. do taste test. finds right one, make a sample batch with 500ml of wine and results of taste test. let sit for a week insure fermentation doe not restart. add result to main batch along with k-meta and sorbate.

 

[G259]

I was thinking that you might make a blend, with a commercial wine, like a pinot grigio. Woodbridge is my go-to, but CK Mondavi is next, whatever is on sale. A couple of magnums might do the trick (guess), but for $20 for 2, it might be worth a shot. You could also make a smaller batch of apple wine to blend with it, a gallon? Maybe you could just add some apple juice to it, that would add sugar and dilute the ABV.

 

[Johnd]

December 8th I started 6 gallon batch of peach wine , The SG jumped up to 1.100. and is now .988. Which gives me an alcohol by volume of 14.70%. This is way too high. I wanted a abv of around 10-11 %. How do I lower the alcohol content and make a lite summer wine? Can I just add a volume of peach nectar? or how do I back sweeten this?

If you really want this to be a light summer wine, then you need to get the ABV down, it’ll still be strong even if you back sweeten it, although simple syrup will thin it out a bit. Adding water will drop the ABV, but will probably dilute your flavors.
Mixing it with another wine like Woodbridge PG (ABV 12%) will never get you to 11%, you’d need to find a lower ABV wine, or make one.
In order to maintain flavor and bring the ABV down, your best bet is juice, apple was suggested, peach would also work, and as mentioned, use sorbate to prevent fermentation from restarting. It’ll take just over 2 gallons to get you down to 11% ABV.

 

[mainshipfred]

In July 2019 I used 120 lbs of perfectly overripe peaches, one gallon of water and by a miscalculation brought the brix up to 24 with 3 gallons of Chardonnay concentrate and got 11 gallons of wine. I didn't want to dilute it with water so I let it go. It was awful but very peachy at first and I just wasn't interested in tasting it so just let it sit until I could figure out what I wanted to do with it. Sometime in December or the beginning of January I thought I would see what I could do to fix it but it was a different wine. I don't know if it was the quality or amount of peaches or the concentrate but even at the high ABV it is a very nice even summer drinking wine. My suggestion is wait a tad before you make any decisions.

 

[winemanden]

Do as Salcoco suggested do a bench trial. Work out how much water you will need and scale it down for trials. If the taste suits you,fine. If not do as has been suggested and make a low ABV blender. The snag is,would it be ready to drink by summer?
Regards to all.

 

[Rice_Guy]

You are not in a bad place. About a year back I started formulating for “let’s add residual water after each racking” The result is that I have about half of last years wine start at calculated 14% ABV, i top off racking with water and by the time I bottle it is around 11%.

 

[winemanden]

May be maybe not, but I seem to have it in the back of my mind that Jack Keller says something about topping up with water. Lots of different views on that, but it's your taste and your wine.
I'm sure I read it somewhere that Calafornian winemakers prefer it that way rather than having to chaptalise.

 

[Rice_Guy]

@winemaden I am not wanting to say start a thin Jack Keller recipe and keep adding water every time you rack, I have tasted enough at state fair and said “humm this seems to be 3 or 2.5lbs. of fruit per gallon.

If @Donatelo has high/reasonable fruit solids he can get away with water at every racking. Your point noted if his pounds per gallon are low there is frozen white grape/peach which can be used to back sweeten and build back the fruit solids. A guess is that this concentrate is made at 1.185 gravity and it is filtered so that the finished product still has good clarity.

I don’t like adding a lot of fermentable sugars and cloudy pulp at the end and would sorbate if this peach is a 2020 young wine. Pearson’s square will let him formulate peach nectar at 0% ABV and this wine at 14.7% to come out with a target 10% ABV.

 

[tradowsk]

You could add some welch's white grape juice (or white grape peach). They taste good and are clear, so it shouldn't affect your clarity at this stage. Plus it would add a nice complementary flavor to the peaches.