Sweet low Abv wine

[sputnam]

I'm interested in modifying a wine recipe I found on here. It had canned pie filling, juice, and a butt load of sugar. I made it a few times and it was pretty good. The problem is the abv is around 16%! I want to drop that down to less than 9% and have a decent bit of residual sweetness...say maybe about 1.oo8 or so. So, my plan is to first and foremost reduce the sugar, possibly eliminate it. Og around 1.060ish. My main question is, I have a nice yeast cake of wyeast 1056, I think this would work perfectly for what I want. What do you think?

 

[madscientist451]

I think everyone has different tastes and if you like that kind of wine keep doing it.
I've done many experiments with juice, sugar and fruit wines and finally decided that type of wine doesn't suit my taste.
Did you use 1056 for the earlier batches? Perhaps try cutting out 50-75% of the sugar and see how that works.
If you put the actual recipe in, it would be easier to make a specific recommendation.
Fermenting to dryness and then backsweetening to taste may be a method to get the flavor profile you are looking for.

 

[sputnam]

The 1056 is from a beer. I've only used wine yeast to make wine. I thought this particular beer yeast would work well. If there is no scientific reason not to use beer yeast, that's what is like to do. I just heard something about certain yeasts not doing certain sugars. Just making sure 1056 can properly convert table sugar , fruit juice, and pie filling into am acceptable wine