Blueberry wine is too hot.

[CatonRW]

Ok so I started this blueberry wine on 7/2/13 OG of 1.100 5 days in primary removed fruit and racked into secondary 1 gallon carboy. on 8/14/13 I racked it and checked the SG it had dropped to 0.990 in that time so I did a taste test and it was very tart and quite hot. Racked this wine again today not so tart but still hot in taste test but I added a campden tablet as well as sweetener do I need to worry about this.

I dont understand one thing either I started a cherry wine the same day and OG was 1.100 on it as well but SG has not dropped below 1.000 this whole time I added campden tablet and sweetener to it as well.

I used Red Star Montrachet yeast in both wines.
Sweetener = 1 cup Oliver Mango Honey Wine (was all I had in the house) + 1/2 cup of white sugar.

 

[Sammyk]

Did you add sorbate as well? If not your will have bottle bombs from sweetening before all the yeast is dead. If it is still in carboys, re-fermenation will start and the wine will be even "hotter".

 

[CatonRW]

No I did not add sorbate it is still in carboys its only been in carboys for 2 months I will wait until 6 moths at least before bottling. I guess I could put sorbate in it now to stop any possible restart of fermentation.

 

[Yooper]

No I did not add sorbate it is still in carboys its only been in carboys for 2 months I will wait until 6 moths at least before bottling. I guess I could put sorbate in it now to stop any possible restart of fermentation.

No, don't just add sorbate now. It won't work.

How stabilizing works is that the wine needs to be totally and completely clear. That's because sorbate doesn't kill yeast, but it inhibits yeast reproduction. Once the wine is clear, and not dropping any more lees (which has alot of yeast in it), the wine is racked onto a solution of campden and sorbate. Campden is an antioxidant and doesn't impact yeast at all- that's why winemakers use it. Anyway, sorbate works better in the presence of campden.

So you'd use 1 campden tablet per gallon, crushed and dissolved in a little boiling water, along with 1/2 teaspoon of sorbate per gallon, and put that in a new carboy. Then rack the clear wine into that. Wait a few days, and then the wine can be sweetened to taste.

The sweetener you added will ferment out, unless you reach the alcohol toxicity of the yeast strain you used. So the wine will get hotter, and not sweeter, with that addition.

The only thing to do now is to wait until fermentation completely stops, and the wine is clear, and then stabilize it and then sweeten. It should take a while, if the yeast is still active so don't rush it.

 

[CatonRW]

Be quite honest it has been 24 hours and I have seen no sign of additional fermentation so far. I will wait a couple more days and go from there thanks.

These are both fairly dark so I'm not expecting them to clear very much am I right to assume they will be more like reds than a blush. Pic Below.

 

[Yooper]

All that foam on the top of the blueberry is a big sign that it's fermenting.

 

[yeastluvr]

Looks like it is fermenting to me

 

[CatonRW]

Sorry about that. That pick was from the initial fermentation I always record my first attempts with pics and documentation I put it on in reference to the darkness in the color of the wine this is a current pic of the wine and it is still doing nothing at all. and the only reason I ask about color is because I've haven't made a wine this dark yet.