Watered Down Wine Problem

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Felixio

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I have two batches of pumpkin wine that are currently in primaries. The original plan was to make 5 gallons of regular and 5 gallons of pumpkin wine. This required 25 pounds of grated pumpkin flesh per batch, a measure of sugar that I don't have infront of me, and since I was working with what I thought would be a good amount of solids, I followed the measured amount of water blindly. Well I had to move both batches to larger primaries because they over filled my 8 gallon buckets. I thought "oh, it'll strain out", but it didn't! They started with a SG of 1.054 and 1.052, and after two weeks in the primaries (and a rough start fermenting) I strained the one and came away with 8 gallons of liquid. I put the lid on that primary, airlocked it, and now I'm freaking out. I know the ABV is damn low, so I'm thinking about feeding the yeast more sugar, but that'll leave me with a thin, watery wine, so I'm thinking about adding canned pumpkin as well. This will increase the volume of the must and I already have 8 gallons of liquid, so I'm thinking of bumping the whole thing to 10 gallon batches and splitting them into 2x 5 gallon carboys. I think that with 2 gallons of volume I can make up for the flavor lost, the sugar lost, and of course I'll add the missing nutrients, acid, energizer, pectic enzyme (maybe a little more, since I'll be adding canned), and other additives.

Any thoughts?

TL;DR-Watered down pumpkin wine. Should I add more sugar and canned pumpkin to make up for lost ABV/flavor?
 
I'd start with more pumpkin, scaling everything up to a 10 gallon batch (except water, of course!). If it's already started fermenting, that's fine but you'll need to do some math to get the OG around 1.085-1.095.
 
To bump the SG and the body you can add 100% white grape juice concentrate. Split the eight gallons equally into two five gallon carboys, add the thawed concentrate to reach your new target SG and top off with pumpkin. If you could buy butternut squash, peel it, chunk it and roast it you would pull better flavor. Just remember you will lose volume when you rack off the lees/pulp.

Or make a two gallon batch using your pumpkin, squash whatever...let it drop SG by 2/3 and combine it with batch#1---would take 5-8 days ideally. Remember one cup of sugar per gallon increases SG by 0.020.
 
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