I just read the 2020 Scottlabs winemakers handbook, and now have two questions:
- They mention that fruit wine musts are very nutrient deficient, which I understand is due to the large quantities of water added, diluting the naturally occurring nutrients from the fruit. If I were to generalize a bit, would I go too far assuming that the nutrient concentration in such must is closer to 0, and simply add the amount of nutrients outlined for the yeast strain and gravity etc (maybe subtracting 10% or so of the amount as a precaution), without measuring the nutrient concentration? Or is that a good approach for home winemaking? It's not possible for me to measure the YAN.
- They state that 25g/hL of yeast is a sweet spot. For a while now I've wanted to learn how far down I can go with my yeast addition to maximize the yeast cell multiplication before running into complications (from what I've heard the yeast multiplication phase is when a lot of flavour compounds is produced, unless I'm wrong of course) - is 25g/hL this sweetspot, or can I go lower than that? And how does this translate to small scale home winemaking, like 10-20L batches?
