Has anyone ever used glycerin to back sweeten? The guy at the wine making shop suggested it and it was cheap enough to just pick up. I was thinking about using this to back sweeten a concord concentrate. Has anyone used this and do you need to put in potassium sorbate to keep it from refermenting? Thanks!
Back sweetening
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saramc
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You can use glycerin to add a bit of body, but I do not know that I would use it as a backsweetener alone.
Thanks for the replies. I guess the guy at the wine shop was wrong. He didn't really seem to know what he was talking about anyway. Ok, so I need to back sweeten this welch's concord because it is just too dry. Is there a water/sugar ratio for a simple syrup? What options do I have? Thanks again!
First, stabilize the wine with either wine conditioner (which also has sweeteners in it) or sorbate and campden. Then you can sweeten to taste with a simple syrup. Simple syrup is easy- 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. Boil, and cool.
An easy way to sweeten the batch is to pull out a sample and add a specific amount of sugar to very small samples and sweeten to a variety of amounts. Say, 1.004, 1.008, 1.010, etc. Taste them and see how you like it best. Then sweeten just a tad bit under where you liked it- as for some reason it gets sweeter in the bottle. If you love it at 1.010, sweeten the whole batch to 1.008. It takes a little calculation, but it works out great.
Well I can tell you two things I have learned while making yoopers welchs grape juice wine. First off you will want to stabilize the wine with campden and potassium sorbate. The guy at my lhbs reccomended wine conditioner to back sweeten the wine fwiw He has failed me with his advice countless times and I do not put much faith in his advice though I will let others more knowledgeable say if this is correct for sure. The second is to make a syrup with corn sugar and water and slowly add to the wine until the sweetness you like is achieved. The only downfall to method 2 is that it is kinda difficult to get the gravity right because it's kinda like an extract beer as the syrup needs to be integrated into the wine fully to get a spot on hydro reading. Others have said to use a proportion ratio to determine the amount to add but my math sucks so I don't attempt that. Good luck.
How much is too dry, I make a semi sweet concord and Ives that comes out good after 8 months in bottle. If this type of varietal is racked off primary ferm in 2-3 weeks 1 cup of granulated sugar added to concord and dissolved should meet the RS at bottling.
