Back sweetening starting point.

Hello all,
I'm in the process of making my first bath of wine. I have 12 gallons of strawberry wine (I had ALOT of excess strawberries) that has been racked twice now. I'm wondering if there is a starting point for back sweetening. I plan on using white grape juice to resweeten (unless someone has a better idea). I am afraid of over sweetening because the wine doesn't taste good at all yet and I'm unsure of how to judge sweetness if the wine doesn't taste good until it has aged. We generally like sweet fruit wines or moscato. Any help would be appreciated! I just really don't want 12 gallons of nastiness!

Klug7214 said:

Hello all,
I'm in the process of making my first bath of wine. I have 12 gallons of strawberry wine (I had ALOT of excess strawberries) that has been racked twice now. I'm wondering if there is a starting point for back sweetening. I plan on using white grape juice to resweeten (unless someone has a better idea). I am afraid of over sweetening because the wine doesn't taste good at all yet and I'm unsure of how to judge sweetness if the wine doesn't taste good until it has aged. We generally like sweet fruit wines or moscato. Any help would be appreciated! I just really don't want 12 gallons of nastiness!

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What I think is "good" may be way too dry for you, as I like dry wines. And what you think is good, I may find unbearably sweet.

A couple of things you can do to see how you like it. The first is to take a small sample of the wine. Taste it. If it's not good, what's wrong? Is it bland? Too acidic? Too tart? etc. Then you can adjust things in the sample to see if it improves. If it's bland, some acid blend might help. Then, if it's too dry, some simple syrup (make with water and sugar) is added to see if you like that better. Once you know what you need to do, we can help you do that to the whole batch.

One tip with sweetening- sweeten just a bit under the actual amount of sweetness you want, as it seems to get sweeter in the bottle. What I mean is, sweeten a sample to what you think is perfect, then take the SG. If you love it at 1.018, sweeten the whole batch to 1.016.

We can help you with playing around with various things in the sample to get what you want out of the wine. I don't see grape concentrate as an improvement in strawberry wine, but if you do and you like it, that's the important thing. Of course, each wine is recipe dependent so it depends on what you started with in the beginning.