sweeting wine

[wezil]

sweeting with lactose good idea, bad idea. As it's unfermentable it might save adding ps and keeo the yeast cleaning up anything left over without getting it all excited again. After all you don't stop the yeast if your brewing beer (ps im a newbie) pps I cant stand artifical sweetners.

 

[RobWalker]

BAD IDEA! Lactose is really a body additive and won't sweeten much compared to the mouth feel it will add. Tabletop sweeteners are also awful. Sugar is really the only way.

 

[alanywiseman.]

Stabilise your wine with potassium sorbate and a campden tablet once fermentation has finished then backsweeten with sugar :

 

[Moley]

If you need to sweeten a wine I don't really see any way of avoiding the sulphite & stabiliser route, but the quantities we use are fairly minimal, one campden tablet to the gallon and a level half teaspoonful of sorbate.

Let the wine ferment all the way out, plus a week for the yeasties to completely finish their job, then rack and stabilise. If you just want to lift the gravity from dry to medium-dry then there will probably be some topping up required after racking, for which you can use grape juice. If you want to bring it back to medium or even sweet then it's probably going to have to be granulated, brewing or fruit sugars.


Having said that, has anyone tried using Truvia?

 

[Pearlfisher]

I've back sweetened with Ritchie's wine sweetener which tastes ok.

 

[wezil]

Cheers for the answers I dare say this won't be the last silly question i'll ask, but hey if you don't ask you don't learn! :grin:

 

[Johnsan]

If you need to sweeten a wine I don't really see any way of avoiding the sulphite & stabiliser route, but the quantities we use are fairly minimal, one campden tablet to the gallon and a level half teaspoonful of sorbate.

Let the wine ferment all the way out, plus a week for the yeasties to completely finish their job, then rack and stabilise. If you just want to lift the gravity from dry to medium-dry then there will probably be some topping up required after racking, for which you can use grape juice. If you want to bring it back to medium or even sweet then it's probably going to have to be granulated, brewing or fruit sugars.


Having said that, has anyone tried using Truvia?

I used Truvia Sunday to backsweeten a bottle of Fruit tea wine that grandaughter and I have prepared for her mum's birthday. Worked as a sweetener quite well I think, but does seem to have made it a little cloudy. I am going to look at it again tomorrow (do a wine glass comparision between this bottle and an unsweetened one) and compare the clarity. Will let you know the result.

 

[Moley]

I asked that because I knew my wife had some in the cupboard, I dabbed my moistened finger tip into the tub and then licked it, and while it was very sweet there didn't seem to be any unpleasant aftertastes.

However, I then used some in a mug of coffee, and it was drinkable but not quite right. An hour later I could still taste it, so it probably isn't the alternative sweetener I imagined it might be.