chip82

Recipes 

Hello all,

I was reading the thread about the persimmon wine, and a lot of it. But it got me thinking about the sugars by weight. In the second and third posts it was mentioned about not adding sugar because the sugar by weight for the persimmon was about 15%, though I have found it to be about 12.5% from other sources. This got some wheels turning upstairs and I am wondering how people figure out how much sugar to add, other than looking at a recipe or experience. Hypothetically, if I were to attempt to make my own wine with an uncommon fruit, how would I use the sugar by weight to make my own recipe?

Thanks in advance,

Chip

david_42

Recipes 

I basically ignore the sugar in the fruit. An example: 20 lbs of blackberries in a 5 gallon batch of wine. At 5% sugar, they contributed 1 lb of sugar vs the 12.5 lbs of cane sugar I used in the batch. That's about 7% of the total.

Obviously, there are exceptions, like grapes.

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chip82

Recipes 

So is there a goal to how much total sugar goes into a batch of wine or is just a matter of it depends? I am guessing it is a matter of contingency theory, but I didn't know if there was a general rule of thumb, i.e. using your example above, when making wine you want the sugar to be 2.7 lb/gal for your wine.

CandleWineProject

Recipes 

I recently attended a class on fruit wine (which I've been making for awhile now). The teacher said to shoot for 1.075-1.085. Right there, he nailed what I've only danced around. Basically, you want alcohol, but not too much as to destroy/hide the fruit flavor.