I knew my mistake after bottling the wine. Actually I knew it before bottling and just ignored it. Kathy and I bottled her 2010 Muscat. The wine was fermented dry and last weekend she added potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulphite. This weekend we backed sweetened the Muscat wine with Muscat concentrate. Our error, we didn’t filter the wine.
The wine was fairly clear until we added the Muscat concentrate to sweeten it. It then became cloudy. Not real cloudy but enough to take away the clearness and replace it with a haze. Since we do not have filtering equipment, we skipped that step. I need to buy a small filtering kit.
This is the first time we’ve back sweetened a wine with concentrate. First we took out a liter of the wine and added 50 ml of concentrate. We then increase the total concentrate to 100 ml. That seemed a bit too sweet so we took the specific gravity reading. Our reading came to 1025 that put the wine into the sweet range. We decided to go with less than the 100 ml of concentrate to a liter rate but a bit more than the 50 ml rate. We added one liter of concentrate to the 18 liters of wine. The specific gravity reading was at 1015 that puts the wine into the medium sweet category.
A number of winemakers have told use to decrease the sugar when sweetening a wine to below what you like. Their rationale is one can always add sugar when drinking the wine (Kathy has threatened to do this but never has) but you can’t take away the sugar when drinking the wine. We are satisfied with the medium sweetness.
I’m not OK with the haze though. So I need to find an inexpensive filter, one that would be perfect for small five to ten gallon batches of wine. Do you have any suggestions?
Cheers,
Terry
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