I’m having trouble understand how may cans of County Fair Fruit Bases to use. It says that you can use 1 to 4 cans to make 5 gallons of homemade wine. How many cans of the these wine making fruit bases should I use to make the best wine?
Thanks Wanda
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Wanda,
The number of cans of fruit base you use controls how light or heavy-bodied the wine will be. Using one particular number of cans is not necessarily better or worse than using another. It’s just different and subject to personal tastes and preferences.
If you like a crisp, refreshing wines, one that would goes great outdoors in the summer months, then you would use one or two cans of fruit base. These wines will be more thirst-quenching on the palette. If you prefer bold, full-bodied wines, one that might go well after dinner, than you would use three or four cans of the wine making fruit base. These wines will have a lot more body with a longer, more-layered finish. Regardless of the number of cans you use, the wine will turn out equally well in terms of quality. It’s more of a matter of personal taste.
On the side of each can of County Fair Fruit Base you are provided with the wine recipes and directions for each number of cans, from one to four. The wine making process is the same in each case, but the amounts of other wine making ingredients vary slightly. This is necessary to keep the wine’s flavor in balance.
So to answer your question more directly, you will need to decide how many cans of wine making fruit base are right for you. It’s a question of tastes, not whether it’s good or bad. Regardless of the number of cans of wine making fruit base you choose, follow the wine recipe on the side of the label and you will turn out a remarkable fruit wine… one you’ll be proud to share with family and friends.
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.

When making wine should I add all the sugar all at once or can I add sugar to the wine during the fermentation?
Name: Mark
State: Ohio
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Hello Mark,
In general, you do not want to add sugar during fermentation. You will want to add all the sugar to the wine before the fermentation – all at once, upfront. There is no real advantage to spreading the sugar throughout the primary fermentation, just as long as you are shooting for a reasonable level of alcohol (10% to 14%). Any wine yeast you choose to use will be able to readily ferment to this level of alcohol, even when all the sugar is added to the wine must before the fermentation.
The biggest reason you’ll want to add all the table sugar all at once, besides the fact it’s less work, is that it makes it easier to calculate your wine’s finished alcohol.
Sugar is what turns into alcohol during the fermentation. This is fermentation 101. To know how much alcohol the fermentation is making, you have to know how much sugar has been fermented. This requires you to know how much sugar the fermentation started with and how much sugar the fermentation ended with. The difference is what was fermented into alcohol. Both of these things can be easily determined with a hydrometer by taking a reading before and after the fermentation and comparing the two.
If you add sugar to the wine during the fermentation, additional hydrometer readings will need to be logged to eventually know how much alcohol is in the wine. These additional calculations can be annoying and even hard to remember to do. It requires you to pull out the hydrometer each time you want to add more sugar and take a specific gravity reading both before and after the addition of the additional sugar.
The only possible time you would want to add sugar fermentation is if you intend to make a high-alcohol wine. In this case you would want to start out the fermentation with enough sugar to reach 13% or 14% alcohol. Then as the fermentation runs out of sugar – which is determined with hydrometer readings – you will want to start feeding sugar to the fermentation in intervals.
The goal is to end up with a wine that is high in alcohol but not too sweet to drink. The fermentation will come to a point where the wine yeast can do no more. Exactly when that will be is not a certainty. It varies from one fermentation to the next, depending on a number of variables. When this happens you want little to no remaining sugar in the wine. This is the reason why you would feed the sugar to the fermentation as it progresses beyond 14%.
So in the end I guess the answer to the question: “can I add sugar during fermentation?”, is yes you can. With the only side note being “but it only makes sense if you are making a high alcohol wine”. For any normal wine making situation, it is only creating more work to do so.
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.

I am having some trouble getting some of my fruit wine to clear. The berry wines clear right away (black raspberry, elderberry, blueberry, raspberry, current) but some of the other fruit wines stay cloudy (apple, peach, pear, dogwood). Is there something different I should be doing with these wines to make them clear better?
Name: Charlene
State: New York
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Hello Charlene,
It might be a pectin haze that’s making your wine cloudy. Some fruits have more pectin in them than others. Pectin is the gel that holds the fruit’s fiber together. If the pectin is not completely broken down during the fermentation you can end up with what known as a pectin haze in your wine. This sounds like what is giving you a cloudy wine.
During the fermentation the yeast will produce pectic enzymes to breakdown the pectin cells. You may have also added pectic enzyme directly to the batch per your wine recipe. With most fruits this is sufficient, but even then you can sometimes end up with a pectin haze with the particular fruit wines you mentioned.
Apple, peach and pear all have significant levels of pectin, more so than most other fruits. The dogwood I’m not sure about. If you did not add pectic enzyme to your wine recipe, then most certainly a pectin haze is the issue at hand. But, even if you did add pectic enzyme, this is still what I suspect is going on because of the specific wines that are cloudy. Pectic enzyme is that important.
As for what you can do now…
Whether or not you have added pectic enzyme to your wine must, you can add more now, however it may take some time for the wine to clear… sometimes months. Of course, this is assuming you have not bottled the wine already. If you have, then that ship has already sailed, so to speak. You could decant the wine; treat the wine; and then re-bottle, however I would not do it if it were my wine, simply for the fact that this type of cloudiness dose not affect the flavor at all only appearance. Live-and-learn, and move on.
Even at that, one thing you could do for future reference is to take a bottle of the suspect wine; add it to a quart Mason jar, or similar; and treat it with a teaspoon of pectic enzyme. This would be an extremely strong dose, so if a pectin haze is the issue at hand, you should see it respond to the addition of pectic enzyme by clearing in a matter of days if not hours. This will let you know if you have found the problem in the form of a pectin haze for future reference and give you a little piece of mind.
As a home winemaker, pectin haze issues should always be in the back of one’s mind. It’s something that doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, it can be very aggravating. Keep a particularly close eye when fermenting fruits high in pectin and always use pectic enzyme when fermenting fresh fruits.
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.

I was looking at buying the European Select Riesling and wanted to know if it can be made sweet.
Thanx Parker
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Hello Parker,
The short answer to your question is: you can make any of the wine kits we sell as sweet or as dry as you would like. It’s just a simple matter of back sweetening the wine kit.
If you follow the directions that come with these wine kits your wine will come out dry. If you want the wine sweeter add sugar to taste before bottling. We recommend sweetening with cane sugar, but you can experiment with other sweeteners such as honey, grape concentrate, etc.
The cane sugar should be completely dissolved before sweetening the wine kit with it. The easiest way to do this is to put the cane sugar with one to two times the water in a sauce pan. Heat the mix until the liquid becomes clear. Once the mixture has completely cooled you can blend it into the wine.

If you are sweetening your wine kit you must also add potassium sorbate
to eliminate any chance of the wine re-fermenting.

Potassium sorbate is a wine stabilizer that hinders the yeast cells ability to regenerate itself. Without the potassium sorbate you can end up with bottles of wine that have an active fermentation in them. That would not be a good thing. Pressure will build up until it either pops the cork or explodes the bottle. So, be sure to add a dose of potassium sorbate at the same time. That would be 1/4 teaspoon per gallon of wine.
Another way to go about sweetening wine kits is to use wine conditioner. This is a wine sweetener that already has the wine stabilizer in it. They come in pint bottles. This is usually about the right amount for sweetening six gallons of wine. By using the wine conditioner you do not have to worry about your wine re-fermenting in the bottles.
When back sweetening your wine kits, how much sugar you add is completely up to you. One of the most enjoyable things about making your own wine is that you get to make it the way you want it.
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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.