Bottling Mulled Wine

[Josefmic]

Hi people, my name is Josef and I'm new to the group. Although winemaking is a super interesting subject until now I haven't practically made wine from scratch.

I have a question regarding making ready-made and bottled mulled wine. I bought ready-made full-bodied wine and the plan is to peel all the fruits and leave the wine infusing together with the spices for a week, maybe two. The wine will be kept in a fermenting container with a floating lid. Please note that here I do not want the wine to begin fermenting - should I use sulfites in this case?

The next process will be to pass the mixture through a colander and heat it up to 61 degrees celsius, so any growth is completely killed.


The question is, during the steeping process, what products should I use to stop the mixture from fermenting and for keeping it safe (prevent any other growths)?

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Josef and welcome. My guess is if you purchased commercial wine that wine has been stabilized either through filtering out every last yeast cell or by adding sorbates and sulfites to the wine. BUT if you are concerned, simply add enough Potassium Sorbate and Potassium meta-Bisulfite to your wine according to the instructions you get with these two compounds. The K-meta will tend to kill any wild yeast on the fruit and the K-sorbate will prevent any yeast not killed form reproducing. Home wine makers tend to use these two compounds when they want to add sugars to sweeten a wine they have fermented brut dry BUT all that said, if your plan is to pasteurize your wine then you will be killing all yeast and bacteria anyway and so there is no reason , in my opinion, to ALSO add those chemicals.