Follow Up Warning To Increasing The Alcohol Level In Your Wine

I received a very insightful reponse to my most recent post on increasing the alcohol level in your wine, which I thought I should share with you all as there is a “darker side” to it that you should be aware of!

Mark writes:

“I have a couple comments on your blog post.  First of all, you should add a caution statement about adding sugar into fermenting wine.  It needs to be added very slowly.  The first time I did this, I dumped about 4 lbs of sugar into my 6 gallon primary while it was still actively fermenting.  WOW what a mess.  It foamed up like crazy and overflowed the primary bucket and went all over the floor.  Lesson learned. 
 
The next point is that I have found that adding extra sugar at the beginning has much the same affect if all you want is about 15% alcohol.  If you start with a brix of about 30-32 I usually end up with at least 15% alcohol without having to add sugar a second time.
 
Lastly, there may be a consideration on the type of yeast you use.  Some yeasts will burn themselves out and drown in the alcohol when it gets up around 13-14%.  I have not experimented much with this but I do know that Cote des Blancs has a good tolorance for higher alcohol content.
 
As far as the taste is concerned, you may find that the final RS needs to be higher in the bottled wine if the alcohol content is higher to achieve the same taste as you’d have with a lower alcohol content.  That has been my experience anyway.
 
I hope this information helps.

- Mark”

Thanks Mark – certainly worth mentioning to everyone!

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

How To Make Wine From Coca Cola

Have you ever considered making wine from Coca Cola?

I can’t really say I had … at any point in time, but I came across this video on YouTube and it peaked my interest.

See for your selfL

Sounds tempting until you see what happens when he tastes his wine “experiment” …

So what do you think? Something you’d try?

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

Great Idea For Labelling Your Carboy During Wine Making

Click To View a Larger Photo

Here’s how the author did it:

Recently, I have had a lot of request about where I got the signs I have on my carboys.   Well I just took some Mardi Gras beads (everyone has some of these around the house) and cut them to about 10 inches.   Then I cut up some thin plastic, which I believe was excess bathroom shower liner I had cut off some time ago.  I made small squares for the labels, and glued the Mardi Gras beads to them.   Then I just used my label maker for the wine type and year.   I kept mine in separate lines so I can don’t have to print out full labels each time.  I’ll just keep them from each type and change the year with each new batch.   If you’ve got a good idea, be sure to mention it in the wine forum where everyone is constantly learning.

I’m typically not as fancy as I write info onto either masking tape or a Post-It Note (see below) and then place that on the carboy

Masking Tape Carboy Label

Post-It Note Carboy Label

For me these are more functional (and easy to do) but I thought the above idea was pretty cool nonetheless.

How do you tag your carboys when aging your wine?

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

Why You Can’t Always Assume What Your Wine Is Doing

With a number of batches of wine under my belt I subconciously must have felt that I could “sense” how my current batch of wine was progressing. I quickly found out that this was unfortunately not the case and here’s why!

I started working on a batch of white wine back in November and I made the mistake of rushing through the preparation so that I could just get it done versus enjoying the moment.

The one thing I didn’t cut corners on though was cleaning the equipment, which I had soaking in a pink solution overnight so I was good there.

I added all of the ingredients as I should except for the yeast …

The package suggested that I hydrate the yeast first but I felt it would be fine if I just sprinkled it onto the wine must (as other kits I had done said to do that so I figured I was good to go). 

I tested the S.G. and temperature and everything looked good.

I then added a brew belt to the primary and let things begin.

Now I typically judge how things are progressing with my wine by the yeast smell and the bubbling in the airlock and while there was definitely a yeasty smell after a few days I didn’t see much in the way of bubbling action going on. This was concerning!

I decided to leave the brew belt on for a few more days (due to the lower temperature in my basement) to see if that would help and it didn’t seem to.

Convinced that the fermentation was stuck I went to the local wine making supply store and bought more yeast in anticipation of having to start over again.

The guy at the store suggested that the wine was starved of oxygen so leave the lid on the primary unsealed to let oxygen in – this should help with the fermentation. He also clarified that you typically don’t have to rehydrate dry yeast with kits but you would have to with fruit wine since the since the juice wasn’t balanced for things like sugar levels or acid levels and therefore need a bit of a “kit start”. Thought that was interesting!

When I got home I decided to test the SG before I added more yeast fully expecting it to only have moved a little but was absolutely shocked to find out that the fermentation was completely finished! That’s right, it had feremented from 1.08 all the way down to 0.998 but had done it really “discretely”.

I absolutely couldn’t believe it! So just when you think you can sense how well your wine is doing, it’s best to get the real picture of what’s going on by double checking with some simple measurements like SG.

Certainly a lesson learned for me!

On a side note:

I had left the yeast packet in my jacket pocket and only realized this after I had put my jacket into the washing machine that was set to use warm water. Luckily I remembered this early on in the washing process and I can only imagine how my clothees would have smelt after being washed in warm water and yeast after 30 minutes …