• Please visit and share your knowledge at our sister communities:
  • If you have not, please join our official Homebrewing Facebook Group!

    Homebrewing Facebook Group

Maple wine - changing the sweetness

Homebrew Talk

Help Support Homebrew Talk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

zirtico

Member
Joined
Dec 2, 2013
Messages
6
Reaction score
0
I had a maple wine experiment that I started about a month ago. I fermented a 1:1 mixture of maple syrup and water to retain a dominant maple flavour in the final product.

Most of it was oaked with medium toast American oak and the chips have been re-inserted into the bottles for oaking to continue. I enjoyed the half bottle of unoaked wine that remained after bottling it all.

The alcohol bite was dominant even only at 12% ABV, as this is way too young to be enjoyed yet, however it was drinkable and still very sweet.

Questions:
Will the sweetness reduce as it ages or increase as the alcohol bite mellows out?
Will the oaked batches taste less sweet because of the oak flavour? (fairly heavily oaked)
If it is still tasting too sweet after some ageing, what can I do about it besides throwing it away/refermenting? Will the addition of a little acid through lemon juice help? Or should I add a little vodka/water mixture to retain the alcohol content while diluting the sugar content and maintaining flavour?
 
If it was completely done fermenting, and especially if it was stabilized properly, it will remain sweet. If it wasn't done fermenting, some of the sweetness will ferment out and the bottles will explode or the corks will pop out.

Putting the oak in the bottle is an unusual idea. I normally only oak for a few weeks at most, so I would think a bottle with oak in it would be overoaked in a very short period of time.

Did you take hydrometer readings, to ensure fermentation was complete, before bottling? If you did, and the wine was finished, you'll avoid bottle bombs for sure.
 
The problem wasn't the fermentation. After reading previous threads on maple wine, if fermented to dryness, much of the time one loses the maple flavour which I did not want to do, so I stabilized and cold-crashed and rack the wine, leaving the yeast behind.

It is possible that it may be a bit overoaked but the oak flavour should diminish gradually and I've read that oak flavours "blend" well with the other flavours when the oak is added during the fermentation which it was. I'm just wondering how to reduce/counter the sweetness a bit so that it remains sweet, but not cloying.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top