I never made wine before… I made a white merlot for my mother… we did it together… we sampled it yesterday… its going to be bottles in 2 days… she wants it sweeter. would it be possible (yest I know ill lose abv) to sweeten it with a type of juice? don’t know if it would referment and cause exploding bottles or what. and if so what would you recommend for a type of juice. thank you
I’m no expert but what I do is treat it with the appropriate amount of potassium sorbate and back sweeten with plain table sugar. Take some of the wine and warm it in a pan so the sugar will dissolve. Word of caution: it will end up sweeter than you think.
Easiest thing is to use wine conditioner. Made specifically for this purpose. Already has appropriate amount of sorbate and will not ferment. As mentioned above, you don’t want to over sweeten. Add about 1/6-1/5 of a bottle to 23l pf wine / stir in / taste / add more if needed. You can bottle right after the addition with no worries. This is what your kit producer would specifically recommend.
My suggestion for next time is to go with a White Zinfandel kit. The f-pack contains almost twice as much sweetness as the White Merlot kits - for most companies anyway.
[quote=“Brew Meister Smith”]Easiest thing is to use wine conditioner. Made specifically for this purpose. Already has appropriate amount of sorbate and will not ferment. As mentioned above, you don’t want to over sweeten. Add about 1/6-1/5 of a bottle to 23l pf wine / stir in / taste / add more if needed. You can bottle right after the addition with no worries. This is what your kit producer would specifically recommend.
My suggestion for next time is to go with a White Zinfandel kit. The f-pack contains almost twice as much sweetness as the White Merlot kits - for most companies anyway.[/quote]
Good advice.
Stabilizing the wine and adding sugar (either in the form of table sugar, grape juice, or something else) is a tried and true method that is used by professional winemakers as well as hobbists. In a home setting, the easiest way to stabilize the wine (which is just a fancy way of saying kill off the yeast), is to add BOTH potassium sulfite and potassium sorbate. You need both to be sure that you disable enough yeast to remove the risk of re-fermentation. The wine conditioner is a good way to go for you, because as Mr. Smith said, it contains the sorbate already in the correct concentration. It is very likely that the sulfite addition was part of your kit; wine won’t last very long if you don’t add sulfite prior to bottling.
