When making wine at home, it is difficult to achieve ideal taste. Inexperienced winemakers are often faced with a situation where the prepared alcohol is impossible to drink due to its cloying sweetness. Many people dispose of a failed drink, and in vain. There are three options for what to do if your homemade wine is too sweet. It’s worth using them if you hate getting rid of a valuable product.
Why does excess sweetness appear?
The first reason why wine is too sweet is improper production.
The procedure for creating a grape drink is divided into several stages:
- vintage;
- squeezing juice;
- fermentation;
- lightening.
It is at the third stage that a violation of the production technology is possible, leading to excessive sweetness of the drink. Fermentation is the conversion of sugar into ethyl alcohol. When the chemical process is insufficiently active, an imbalance in taste is revealed.
Also, the product turns out to be overly sweet when the winemaker:
- chose sweet dessert grapes as a raw material;
- used a large volume of water to dilute the grape juice;
- sweetened the wort.
How to fix homemade wine that has a lot of sugar
Three methods are used to correct the sweetness level of homemade alcohol:
- adding water;
- blending;
- repeat fermentation.
These measures are simple, but their technology must be strictly followed. Otherwise, the product will not acquire a pleasant taste, but will become worse in other quality characteristics.
Dilution with water
You can dilute any homemade wine with water, except fortified wine. The procedure is carried out observing the following rules:
- Dilute sweet wine just before drinking. First add water to a small volume of alcohol to test the change in taste.
- Use only boiled or distilled water.
- Red sweet wine is diluted with warm water, white wine with cold water.
- Water is poured in little by little and tasted after each addition. This will prevent the drink from desalinating due to excess liquid addition.
- When combining alcohol and water, you should adhere to the optimal proportion – 1:3.
- It is correct to pour water into wine, but it is incorrect to do the opposite.
If the result of dilution is the desalination of the drink, then you can add a couple of crystals of citric acid to acidify it. It has been noted that diluted wine becomes more aromatic.
You can reduce the sweetness of alcohol using mineral water. The result is a refreshing drink reminiscent of sparkling wine.
Blending
To remove the cloying, sweet wine is combined with dry wine made from grapes of the same variety. If there is no homemade material for blending, then you can buy suitable dry wine in the store.
The drinks are combined slowly and carefully. After each mixing, taste until the taste is optimal. Blending is a creative process that allows not only to reduce the sugar content of alcohol, but also to achieve interesting flavor combinations.
Some housewives do not correct sweet wine, but add it as a substitute for liqueur as an ingredient in homemade cocktails.
Re-fermentation
To reduce the sweetness, the drink is subjected to a repeated fermentation process. The procedure is lengthy, taking more than 2 months, so it is used when dilution and blending have failed.
Sweet wine is combined with wine must in equal proportions. Leave in a warm, shaded place until the fermentation process is complete. This is the most reliable way to save spoiled alcohol.
Prevention measures
To prepare homemade alcohol, you should choose less sweet wine grape varieties, rather than dessert ones.
But it is much more important to follow technological rules during the production process. Do not overdo it with adding water and sugar. It is extremely necessary to carefully control the fermentation stage, when the processed sugar forms the wine strength.If excess sweetener is added to the wort, the fermentation reaction is completed before the drink reaches the required level of sweetness.
Many winemakers whose vineyards are located in temperate latitudes make the mistake of adding too much sugar to the must, hoping to compensate for the lack of sweetness in the berries. Indeed, in unfavorable climatic conditions, grape fruits often ripen sour.
You can tell that the wine will be too sweet at the fermentation stage - by the excessive production of carbon dioxide and the actively bubbling surface of the drink.
However, inexperienced winemakers rarely pay attention to such signs. To measure the amount of sugar correctly, you need experience, but until you don’t have it, you must strictly follow the instructions for preparing wine.
