Homemade wine making advice needed

oliveoil54

Very new to making wine not from kits.

Just made Bramble 9lb & Elderberry Wine 11lb (Internet recipe), using 20lb fruit to approx 10.5lbs sugar, 3tspn pectin enzym, 5 crushed campden tablets, 6 tspn yeast nutrients, 5tspn wine yeast (instructions state rounded & no need to activate), 10 tspn citric acid in 5 gallon fermenting vessel.

Crushed fruit, boiled sugar syrup separately & when cool added to fruit, then added rest of ingredients, stirred well.

Poss 1st mistake teaspoon used was probably a bit large. 2nd mistake then put fermentation lock on FV, prob for approx 2 days. Fermentation was very fast. Stirred each day. Realised mistake & took lock off and covered just with towel to allow air in. After 7 days fine seived & racked to demi johns with fermentation lock. 3rd mistake didn't read specific gravity initially!

Problem the demi johns have stopped fermenting after only a couple of days, they were in dining room where heat is approx 21deg C (70 deg F) and a bit colder at night. Have now moved them near the boiler.

Measured the gravity for the 1st time tonight and its .994 which is too dry??? Also had a brief taste of wine and its very, very tart.
Has the wine stopped fermenting because its got enough alcohol & can we bottle it & hope the flavour improves?
Or should we try to start fermentation again by adding more yeast - if so how much per DJ?
Also to sweeten the wine should we add more sugar syrup if so how much? Or would we better with some form of sweet natural juice? Also when do we add the sweetener?
Any advice would be really welcome.

Penelope_Penguin

oliveoil54 wrote: »

Measured the gravity for the 1st time tonight and its .994 which is too dry??? Also had a brief taste of wine and its very, very tart.
Has the wine stopped fermenting because its got enough alcohol & can we bottle it & hope the flavour improves?
Or should we try to start fermentation again by adding more yeast - if so how much per DJ?
Also to sweeten the wine should we add more sugar syrup if so how much? Or would we better with some form of sweet natural juice? Also when do we add the sweetener?
Any advice would be really welcome.

Racking wine can often stop the fermentation, so my recipes always suggest adding sugar to the demi john to kick start it again

Did you measure the specific gravity of your solution before fermentation? That way you can, IIRC, calculate the alcohol content now

kinkyjinks

oliveoil54 wrote: »

Very new to making wine not from kits.

Just made Bramble 9lb & Elderberry Wine 11lb (Internet recipe), using 20lb fruit to approx 10.5lbs sugar, 3tspn pectin enzym, 5 crushed campden tablets, 6 tspn yeast nutrients, 5tspn wine yeast (instructions state rounded & no need to activate), 10 tspn citric acid in 5 gallon fermenting vessel.


Measured the gravity for the 1st time tonight and its .994 which is too dry??? Also had a brief taste of wine and its very, very tart.
Has the wine stopped fermenting because its got enough alcohol & can we bottle it & hope the flavour improves?
Or should we try to start fermentation again by adding more yeast - if so how much per DJ?
Also to sweeten the wine should we add more sugar syrup if so how much? Or would we better with some form of sweet natural juice? Also when do we add the sweetener?
Any advice would be really welcome.

I'm still pretty new to wine making myself and have made my fair share of mistakes, so this could be wrong. The sugar ratio to fruit looks quite wrong to me. I used 1lb of sugar to 1lb of elderberries and about 10 ozs of sugar to 1lb of blackberries. If it's stopped fermenting and isn't too hot/cold then I'd say the yeast needs more sugar to feed on.

If it was me I'd get the fermentation bucket out again, pour most of the wine back into it and try and dissolve at least 4lbs of sugar in as little wine as I could get away with. When it's cooled down, add it to the rest of the wine. You could even use grape juice to dissolve the extra sugar. Take a gravity reading and maybe add 1/2 a tsp of yeast to kickstart the other yeast then put back into demi johns.

Like I said though, I'm still pretty new to it myself so I could be wrong. This forum is full of experts and they are very helpful for newbies like us.

otterspasm

Hi there,
I'm not VERY experienced but I would say there didn't seem to be enough sugar in the original recipe. I have just made some elderberry wine which called for 4lbs elderberries to 3 1/2 lbs sugar. Nearer to equal quanitities than yours. I'd add some more sugar as previously suggested myself.
HTH :-)

oliveoil54

Also posted on Homebrew forum, have just had a reply from a Moderator with lots of posts, who suggests topping up with cheap supermarket red grape juice.

He calculated the following for me:-
'Didn't take an Original Gravity - extraction from the fruit plus sugar added = 195 ounces, 5 gallons, 39 oz/gal = 1.090
OG of 1.090 and gravity now is 0.994, that's a drop of 96 points which gives 13% alcohol'

He says that by adding more grape juice it should re-activate the yeast already there, & that I dont need to add anymore yeast. We have to leave for another month, then re-rack and check for taste then & if necessary sweeten.

Will keep you posted as to how I get on, its a learning curve, and it also may help someone else.

Many thanks for all your replies.

As this is the easiest & quickest option I'm going to give it a go, wish me luck!

jinny

Like I said though, I'm still pretty new to it myself so I could be wrong. This forum is full of experts and they are very helpful for newbies like us

I second that forum is great try the wurzels orange wine made from supermarket fruit juices it is delicious

kinkyjinks

jinny wrote: »

I second that forum is great try the wurzels orange wine made from supermarket fruit juices it is delicious

:beer: I looove Wurzels orange wine. I had the mother of all hangovers when I trialed it for the first time. It was lots stronger than it tasted and I was a complete novice at the time, so had a couple of glasses followed by a couple of the turbo white. I now know to sample in moderation Which reminds me, I really need to get a few DJs started to stock up for Christmas.