hari 216

Most of the recipes say to stabilize, sweeten to taste, wait 2-4 weeks, and then bottle the wine. This is very much a normal thing to do, so if a recipe doesn't specifically say this, do it anyway. Of course, you can NOT sweeten if you'd like. I rarely sweeten my wines, but I still add that step in the written recipe when I post it. "Stabilize" means to add potassium sorbate and potassium metbisulfite (or a crushed Campden tablet) at the same time, stir until dissolved, and then allow the wine to "rest" for 2-4 weeks to see if it referments. It shouldn't, but if it does you can wait for it to finish -- and it will finish because the two potassium salts render the yeast incapable of further reproduction. The potassium sorbate is not listed as a separate ingredient because some folks don't stabilize their wines and therefore don't need it, but if you "stabilize" a wine you'll need 1/2 teaspoon of the sorbate plus a crushed Campden tablet per gallon of wine.

Use the recipes as guides and measure and adjust any variables you can. If you do this, your wines will generally be better and you'll quickly learn the ins and out of winemaking more thoroughly than if you just followed the recipes.

However, if a recipe says to start fermentation in a primary, do it. Yeast need oxygen to reproduce rapidly, and for the first two or three days rapid reproduction should be all you want your yeast to do. If you start fermentation under an airlock, you are denying the yeast what they need and may or may not have problems. If you do this and have problems, I don't want to hear about it. If you won't follow my instructions and your wine doesn't like it, then take your problems to someone who recommends starting your fermentation under an airlock -- or whatever else you are doing differently.

How Much wine Do recipes Make?

I am asked this question all the time, although it really baffles me sometimes. I mean, some recipes say to use a specific herb or flower, add sugar and other dry ingredients, and then add from 7-1/2 pints to a gallon of water. Since the herbs contain no juice or other liquid, it shouldn't be difficult to conclude that the recipe makes about a gallon of wine. I say about because sugar has a volume, some liquid is lost as sugar is converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide (a gas), and different yeast's lees compact differently -- meaning that you lose more wine with some lees than others when you rack. However, if you top up as instructed, you should always end up with a gallon.

So, as to the question of how much wine do the recipes make, unless they specifically cite another volume, all the recipes on my site are for one U.S. gallon batches. There are several reasons for this:

I am constantly experimenting with new wines or improving old ones, with approximately 22-30 batches going at all times. One-gallon jugs take far less room than larger carboys.

One-gallon batches are more economical to gamble with, especially when some of the ingredients have to be shipped refrigerated and are therefore quite expensive to me. No one pays me to do this, so if I decide to try cloudberry wine and have to import cloudberries from Finland, I have to suffer the cost. Devising a recipe is therefore a gamble (it might not work) and I try to keep the amount gambled at a minimum.

It is less painful to dump out a 1-gallon batch that didn't work out than a 5- or 6-gallon one, and I have dumped out a few.

When they do work out, most wines have to be aged for 6 months to a year, and 5 bottles take less room to store during aging than 25 or 30.

For people who want to make larger batches, all they have to do is multiply the ingredients (except yeast) by the number of gallons desired. This is far easier than trying to adjust a 5-gallon recipe to 3 gallons, for example.

So, if you wanted to make a 6-gallon batch of a particular wine, just multiply the ingredients by 6, except use two packets of yeast instead of one (each sachet of yeast is usually enough to start a batch of 1 to 5 gallons in volume).

Topping Up

As for topping up, you have to decide on your own strategy. Some recipes initially make a little more than a gallon (and I mean an American gallon, or 3.7854 liters). I often say to crush the fruit, add the sugar and other ingredients, and then add one gallon of water. Obviously, when the sugar is dissolved and the juice is pressed or squeezed from the fruit, you'll have more than a U.S. gallon. When you transfer from primary to secondary, it would be nice if you had a jug that would take all of the liquid without overflowing and with exactly an inch of ullage (airspace between the top of the wine and the bottom of the bung) -- a 4-liter, 4.5-liter (British gallon), or 5-liter jug, for example, might work perfectly. Then, when you rack later and lose some of the volume, you can rack into a smaller jug -- for example, from a 4.5-liter jug into a 4-liter one, or from a 4-liter jug into a U.S. gallon jug. But, if you don't have a variety of jugs such as described here, then just fill a gallon jug and put the excess into a smaller wine bottle of an appropriate size (750-ml, 375-ml, 250-ml, 187-ml, or 125-ml). A #2 or #3 bung will fit these various wine bottle sizes to accept an airlock. You then use this excess wine to top up the gallon jug after racking.

Larger batches require different strategies. For a 6-gallon batch, for example, I would divide the 6 gallons into a 5-gallon carboy and a 1-gallon jug, ferment them side-by-side, and use the 1-gallon batch to top up the 5-gallon carboy. After using some of the 1-gallon batch, I would rack the remainder of it into a 3-liter jug. After topping up during the second racking, I would rack the remaining smaller batch into a 2-liter or half-gallon jug, etc. I have a variety of jugs and bottles that I use for "down-sizing" after using some wine for topping up a larger batch. These include 3-liter, 2.5-liter, 2-liter, 1.90-liter (1/2 U.S. gallon), 1.5-liter, 1-liter, 750-ml, etc.

You can also top up with a finished wine of the same kind or very similar to what you are making. However, if you don't have a wine anywhere close to what you are making (nothing is quite like pumpkin wine, for example), any similarly colored wine will do.

You can also top up with distilled (or boiled and cooled) water. Many of the recipes use a bit more sugar than necessary just so when you top up with water the alcohol still ends up at around 12% even after being diluted with the water. If you top up with wine the final alcohol content would differ.

Finally, many people simply use glass marbles or glass decorative pebbles to displace the volume of wine lost to racking. I myself have about 3 quarts of glass marbles I use for this purpose with some of my batches.