I need some help. My homemade wine is too sweet. I made 2 batches of wine one of Blackberry/Raspberry and the other Blueberry/Raspberry/Cranberry. Although they have a great flavor they are way to sweet, can I add some more yeast to get them to ferment some more of the sugar out?

Karey C. – OR
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Hello Karey,

Both of your wines sound like great fruit combinations. So sorry to hear they are causing you a little problem. Keep reading to learn how to fix homemade wine that is too sweet.

There are 2 possible reasons why a homemade wine is too sweet:

1. Too Much Sugar Was Added To The Wine Recipe
   There is a limit to how much alcohol a yeast can tolerate. Once a fermentation produces alcohol to this level, the yeast will simply slow to a stop. If you know that your fermentation has already produced 13-14% alcohol, but the wine is still too sweet, then you’ve added too much sugar to the wine must. You can determine the wine’s alcohol level by taking beginning and current alcohol readings with a wine hydrometer and comparing the two. If this is the reason your homemade wine is too sweet, there is not a whole lot you can do to reduce the sweetness, or make it more dry, other than blend it with a dry wine. For example, you can make blackberry/raspberry wine next year that comes out dry, and then blend this years wine with that. This year’s wine will store just fine in bulk. Just remember to add sulfite to the wine and to eliminate any head-space that may be in with the wine. Hopefully, this will help make your sweet wine taste better.

2. The Fermentation Did Not Complete
   It very well could be that you added an appropriate amount of sugar to produce a reasonable amount of alcohol. It’s just that the fermentation did not fully ferment the sugar into alcohol as it should have. This is known as a stuck fermentation. This could happen for a number of reason. The most common one is temperature. The fermentation got to cool. Yeast are very sensitive to temperature. There are many other reasons as to why your fermentation may have stopped short of its full potential – too many to go over here. I would suggest going through the Top 10 Reasons For Fermentation Failure. This will help you to ferret out the exact cause of such a predicament. Once you know the reason, you can take corrective action to get the fermentation active, again.

Again, the key to knowing why your homemade wine is too sweet is the wine hydrometer. If you did not take a beginning hydrometer reading, you will not be able to tell whether you have 7% alcohol and a fermentation that needs fixing, or if you have 15% alcohol and have simply added too much sugar to your wine.

As to your suggestion of adding more wine yeast, this is rarely a solution to a problem. This is because there is still yeast in the wine. It’s just that it has gone dormant. It is more likely to be an issue of getting the wine yeast in a situation to where it will start fermenting again.

Best Wishes,
Ed Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.

I’ve started my first batch of wine using the toasted oak chips, added after the primary fermentation. I am wondering if during the racking process about to be done after the secondary fermentation, do I transfer the oak chips too?

Name: Debra M.
State: Tennessee

Hello Debra,

Adding oak chips, that have been sap cleared and toasted, directly to the wine has long been one of the tricks up the home winemaker’s sleeve. It allows you to enjoy all the advantages of barrel-aging your wine without the cost or work of using and actual wine barrel.

These toasted oak chips are made from white oak that has been kilned to sap clear and then toasted to raise the woods sweetness to the outer surface of the chip. This toasting is no different than what is done to the inside of a wine barrel.

Typically, we recommend adding oak chips after the fermentation has completed and the wine has cleared. The wine is bulk-aged in something like a carboy along with the oak chips for a matter of weeks to months. You can sample the wine along the way to determine when you would like to take the chips out.

Adding the oak chips during the primary fermentation is okay, however you do not have as much control over the flavor when using this method. It’s hard to know if the wine needs more time on the chips or not. This is because you do not know what the wine is going to taste like at that point in the process.

The only exception to this argument is when you are making wine with a wine ingredient kit. Normally, these kits will instruct you to put the oak chips in the primary fermentation, just as you have done, and then remove them when racking the wine into a secondary fermenter. This method is okay in this situation because the producers of these wine ingredient kits already know exactly how much oak chip is needed in the primary fermentation to end up with a wine in good balance. They have already determined this by bench-testing several batches with varying quantities of oak.

If you are not making a wine from a wine ingredient kit, then I would suggest taking the toasted oak chips out of the wine must at this point. You may already have more oak impression in the wine than you like. You have no way of knowing with a wine in progress. Once the fermentation has completed and the wine has cleared, then you can revisit the possibility of adding toasted oak chips at that time for further aging.

Happy Winemaking,
Ed Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.

How long can I let the wine ferment before racking into a carboy and starting the secondary fermentation? My wine has been working vigorously for almost three weeks now.

Russ — NY
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Hello Russ,

When to start the secondary fermentation is a question we get from time to time. The quick answer is, “it depends”.

If you are fermenting on fruit pulp, you will want to move the wine into a secondary fermenter around the 4th to 7th day. Whether you rack on the 4th day or on the 7th day will make a noticeable difference in the body and color of the wine. The longer the pulp is in the primary fermentation, the more tannin and color pigmentation will be extracted from the fruit. So timing is important when there is fresh fruit involved.

If you are fermenting from a juice concentrate, where there is no pulp involved, when to start the secondary fermentation is still important but not nearly as critical. If you are fermenting an actual wine juice kit, then I strongly suggest that you follow the directions that came with it. It will specify a number of days before your first racking.

If you do not have an actual wine juice kit but are freestyling it with some juice concentrate you have, then I would take the following into consideration when determining when to start the secondary fermentation:

• You will want the primary fermentation to be long enough to allow the yeast colony to grow into healthy numbers. The primary fermentation should be exposed to air. Don’t use an air-lock on it. Just cover it with a thin towel. Oxygen is what allows that little packet of wine yeast you added to flourish to about 100 to 200 times itself. If all goes well, this will happen in about 3 days.

• The fermentation needs to have settled down enough so that it doesn’t foam out of the secondary fermenter. You do not want the secondary fermenter to have a lot of head-space, so there will be little room for foaming. Yes, you could employ a blow-off tube into a jug of water, but it is completely unnecessary to go through such measures when simply waiting longer will do. This is not an issue that will affect the wine. It’s more of a practicality issue.

• You do not want the wine to be sitting on dead yeast cells for extended periods of time. You want to get the wine off the sediment in a timely manner. Not doing so can cause a condition known as autolysis. This is when the live yeast cells start feeding on dead yeast cells. This mostly happens the wine yeast run out of sugars to consume. This result is an off-taste in the wine that ranges from bitter-nut to metallic. For this reason the primary fermentation should last no longer than 2 weeks, and less than this if the fermentation has already stopped.

Russ, all these things need to be considered when trying to figure out when to start the secondary fermentation. If you are making your wine from fresh fruit, the timing is fairly narrow 4 to 7 days. If you are making your wine from a wine juice kit, the answer’s simple: follow the directions. But if you on your own with some concentrate consider the three bullet-points above.

Happy Wine Making,
Customer Service at E. C. Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.

I want to make a sweeter wine without adding wine conditioner. Can I use a “Montrachet” ( red /white) yeast and increase the sugar per gallon to get a controlled “stuck ” fermentation with predictable results? How would I go about that to accomplish my goal?

Name: Bob B.
State: NY
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Hello Bob,

It is true that different wine yeast will ferment a wine down to varying levels of residual sweetness. The ability of a wine yeast to ferment all the sugars is referred to as wine yeast attenuation. Wine yeast that can ferment a wine to complete dryness is said to be a high attenuation yeast. Wine yeast that leave the wine with some sweetness are said to be a low attenuation yeast.

While attenuation has to do with a wine yeast’s ability to ferment that last bit of sugar, there is also alcohol tolerance. This is the ability of a wine yeast to ferment to higher levels of alcohol. Both attenuation and tolerance are closely correlated in the sense that as the target alcohol level of a fermentation goes up by adding more sugar, the ability of a wine yeast to attenuate becomes less. But, depending on the wine yeast’s alcohol tolerance the attenuation may be affect a lot or just a little.

You can see the differences between wine yeast in this wine yeast chart we have on our website which list alcohol tolerance and attenuation (described as “Secondary Fermentation”) listed for each wine yeast.

My reason for explaining this is that while the wine yeast you select will play a major role in how dry or off-dry your wine ends up being, there are many other factors that come into play as well. Not only is their the alcohol level you are shooting for affecting the wine’s outcome, there is also:

• The amount of nutrients available to the yeast
• The temperature of the fermentation
• The amount of saturated oxygen in the water you added
• The acidity level of the wine must
• The amount of residual sulfite in the wine must.

This list goes on and on with each factor effecting the wine yeast’s ability to ferment — or not ferment — to some marginal degree.

With all this taken into consideration, it starts to become clear that controlling the ending sweetness of a wine can be very difficult, if not impossible. No two fermentation ever go exactly the same. While you could have some level of consistency if you fermented the same type of wine over and over and were careful to replicate identical conditions with each fermentation, for the average home winemaker who likes to ferment different wines, using different fruits and different concentrates, this is not a very realistic goal.

Something else that needs to be pointed out is that while different wine yeast ferment differently, the amount they vary is not all that great. While a wine yeast with high attenuation can produce a wine that is puckering dry, wine yeasts with the lowest attenuation will not make a wine seem sweet — just less dry — under typical fermenting conditions.

You can try driving up the sugar level in the wine must with the hopes of the yeast stopping because of high level of alcohol being produced, but this is a very imprecise method that could just a easily result in a wine that is disgustingly sweet.

You can try stopping the fermentation when the sweetness is to your liking, but there are a couple of difficulties with this:

• The first difficulty is that it is hard to judge the sweetness you will like when the wine is still fermenting. It taste completely different during a fermentation then it will after it clears and ages a little. The level of sweetness you like may be compensating for a bitterness in the wine that will not be there later on.

• The second difficulty is that it is not easy to stop a fermentation with any consistency. You can try adding sulfites such a Campden tablets or potassium metabisulfite, however either of these are just as likely not work as they are to work. They are not dependable in a fermenting situation. As a side note, potassium sorbate will have little to no effect on a active fermentation.

This leaves you with using the method most wineries would use to stop a fermentation. That is to chill the wine down, then filter. Chilling the wine down will make the wine yeast dormant. It needs to be held at 30° to 40°F. for about 3 days. Then the wine is siphoned (racked) of the settled yeast and filter with sterile filter pads in a wine filter. These filters are so fine that they will take out over 99% of any of the wine yeast that still remains.

Having said all of this, if you are actually wanting a sweet wine, the easiest and most controllable way for the home winemaker to make a sweet wine is to back-sweeten it. If you are just looking to take the dry edge off of a wine you can do this by choosing a wine yeast that has low attenuation. Good candidates for this would be: Red Star Cotes de Blanc for whites and Lalvin RC 212 for reds.

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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.

Do you have to filter wine before bottling it?

Name: Nancy
State: MN
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Hello Nancy,

Filtering a wine before bottling is not necessary. A wine will clear on its own so long as the fermentation did not go afoul, and acid and pH are in good balance.

Fining agents can even be added to the wine to help the settling process to happen more quickly and thoroughly. For example, if you are making wine from a wine juice kit, normally it will come with bentonite. This will aid in clearing process. The wine will look very clear!

So if this is the case, why do wine filters even exist?
The one thing that needs to be understood about filtering wine with a wine filter is that it is not designed to take the visual cloudiness out of the wine. The filter pads are much too fine for this. They will clog up – usually within the first gallon. Time, gravity and fining agents will take care of the cloudiness. Filtering wine before bottling is done to add a polish to the wine – to add luster and brilliance. It is done to make the wine more beautiful, not less cloudy.

When you filter a wine before bottling you also are taking the last bit of wine yeast out of the wine. This amount of yeast is completely invisible to the naked eye. Doing this helps the wine to be more stable. If the wine is filtered with the finest filter (1/2 micron), it will be considered fermentation stable. By the way, a micron is very small. There’s about 400 of them across a period you find at the end of a sentence in a typical newspaper.

If you are on the fence as to whether or not to filter your wine before bottling, I would suggest comparing your wine side-by-side with a commercially made wine of a similar color. Almost all commercially made wines are filtered. See for yourself the difference then decide if filtering is something you would like to do to your wines.

Happy Winemaking,
Ed Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.

At what point do you aerate your fruit wine?
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Jason,
Aeration should only be done during the primary fermentation. This is the first 3 to 5 days of when the wine is in a primary fermenter and most active.
The only reason aeration is done is to give the wine yeast more ability to multiply and establish a solid colony. When a packet of wine yeast is put into a 5 or 6 gallon batch of wine, it has the monumental task of growing itself 100 to 200 times that little packet. That’s what causes all the beige-colored sediment you at the bottom of a fermenter. To readily do this the wine yeast need air. Without the air the colony size may suffer resulting in a sluggish fermentation.
Ironically, after the yeast colony is well established and the fermentation is starting to slow down, air is the enemy. For the rest of the wine’s life you want to keep air exposure time short and splashing to a minimum. The major concern here being oxidation of the wine.
What all this means for the home winemaker who is making 5 or 10 gallons is that the primary fermenter should be left exposed to air. This can mean doing something as simple as leaving the lid completely off a bucket fermenter. Cover it with a thin tea towel, nothing more. Or for a winery dealing with 500 gallon vats, this could mean continuously pumping and recirculating the wine back out on top the fermentation surface, much like a fountain.
There is a second element to this as well. Regardless of how much you are fermenting, you will always want to make an effort to keep a dried cap from forming on the surface of the fermentation. The pulp will want to rise during a primary fermentation. If left undisturbed it can dry and form a solid cap, choking the wine yeast off from the much needed air.
To prevent this from happening you will want to punch the cap back down into the wine. For most home winemakers with their 5 and 10 gallon batches, once a day is plenty. You can use something as simple as a potato masher for this purpose or you can stir it until the cap is dispersed. For larger batches you may need to punch down the cap several times a day.
Hope this information helps you out.
Happy Winemaking,
Ed Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.

Howdy Ed,
…To balance the tannins, we French oak chipped the must at the start of fermentation [Petite Sirah] and at the half way point applied the Aussie method of Rack and Return to decrease the seeds in the must. Sieving out the seeds also removed the oak chips. My question is, at what stage should we re-oak the juice?
Jamie O. — CA
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Hello Jamie,
I would not automatically assume that you will need to add more oak chips to your homemade wine. In fact, I would not consider adding more French toasted oak chips to the wine until it has cleared and maturated to some degree while in bulk. See what tannins and other proteins drop out on their own, first.
There is nothing wrong with adding toasted oak chips during the fermentation, but you want to use a moderate dosage. Don’t go to overboard. It is possible to add to much. If you want to add oak to the wine during the fermentation, you may also want to consider using oak powder instead of oak chips. Oak powder does not strain out like the oak chips. Having said that, I do prefer using toasted oak chips after the fermentation.
If it is only protein stability that you are concerned about, you also have the option of treating the wine with bentonite, instead of more oak chips. Among other things, bentonite will collect and drop out excessive tannins. This will help to make the wine more heat stable while aging in bottles.
If it is the flavor effects of toasted oak chips you are primarily looking for, it would be best to wait until the wine has aged in bulk for a month or so after the fermentation has completed. This is when I would add oak chips to your homemade wine. I don’t know how many gallons you have, but you can store it in carboys or vats. At this point, you want the wine to be off any yeast sediment and the head-space should be eliminated, as well.
Buy waiting you are allowing the wine to get to a point where you can start to distinguish its developing flavor profile. Adding oak chips at this point will not only help you to stabilize the wine further, it will allow you to monitor the oak balance of the wine. Since the wine is already maturating, you can do this with a little clearer perception of the final outcome.
Monitor the wine by sampling along the way. Depending on the dosage you will want to sample every 1 to 4 weeks.
I recommend 1/4 pound of toasted oak chips for every 10 gallons of wine. At this dosage a typical amount of time for oaking is about 30 to 90 days. Sample the wine every 2 weeks. Here is some more information on how much and how long to use oak chips.
What you are looking for is balance. You want the reduced harshness of oak aging to be in line with woody character the oak is adding.
Best Wishes,
Customer Service at E. C. Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.