understanding wine "must" volume

[Reww]

Hey guys!

So my question is pretty simple, when you go to add your sulfite and pectin to a fruit wine, in my case campden tablets, you need to add based off the volume of the must. i added based off the volume of water i added to the must. but the total volume with the sugar, blueberries and the water addition came out to be much higher then the target volume of wine i am basing my additions off of. my question is,

is the must volume the total volume with everything inside your fermenter? or is the must based off the water addition?

Thank you!

 

[bernardsmith]

Good question, Reww. You are really adding SO2 to the fruit and not the water but if the "fruit" is already juice then assume that that is the volume you are dealing with. Same principle applies to pectic enzymes (you add pectins when you make jam, not wine. You add enzymes to destroy the pectins when you make wine a) to enable more of the juice to be extracted and b) to reduce any haze that the pectins might form in the wine). In short, if you have 1 gallon of fruit then that is the volume you are interested in. If you have 1 gallon of fruit AND 1 gallon of water , you still only have one gallon of fruit but you would (or should) add the SO2 and the pectin enzyme BEFORE you added the water (though you might want to crush the fruit so that the skins are broken).

 

[Reww]

well i have a 2 gallon bucket with about 3.5 pounds of sugar and about 6 pounds of blueberries, i already added my water into everything, so i went and added 1 tsp of pectin, 2 campden tablets and 2 tsp of yeast nutrients. i will let this all sit for a day then i will add my yeast.

I think next time i will smash my blueberries add the sugar with just enough water to dissolve the sugar then add the pectin and campden, then after a day i will add the rest of the water till i reach my target volume.

 

[Bocochoco]

*in Bane voice*
It will be extremely difficult to dissolve that sugar in minimal water.
Why do you want to do this a harder way to achieve the same purpose? Is it supposed to let the pectin work more efficiently?