What to do if the wine turned out too sweet: 3 ways to fix it at home

When making wine at home, it is difficult to achieve perfect taste. Inexperienced winemakers are often faced with a situation where the prepared alcohol is impossible to drink because of its cloying sweetness. Many dispose of a failed drink, and in vain. There are three options for what to do if homemade wine is too sweet. It is worth using them if it is a pity to get rid of a valuable product.

Why there is extra sweetness

The first reason why wine is too sweet is the wrong production.

The procedure for creating a grape drink is divided into several stages:

grape harvest;
squeezing juice;
fermentation;
lightening.

It is at the third stage that a violation of production technology is possible, leading to excessive sweetness of the drink. Fermentation is the conversion of sugar into ethyl alcohol. With insufficient activity of the chemical process, an imbalance in taste is revealed.

Also, the product is overly sweet when the winemaker:

selected sweet dessert grapes as raw material;
used a large amount of water to dilute the grape juice;
oversweetened the wort.

How to fix homemade wine with a lot of sugar

Three methods are used to correct the sweetness level of homemade alcohol:

adding water;
blending;
fermentation repeat.

The indicated activities are simple, but their technology must be strictly observed. Otherwise, the product will not acquire a pleasant taste, but will become worse in terms of other quality characteristics.

Dilution with water

You can dilute any homemade wine with water, except for fortified wine. The procedure is carried out following the rules below:

Dilute sweet wine just before drinking. First, water is added to a small amount of alcohol to test for a change in taste.
Use only boiled or distilled water.
Sweet red wine is diluted with warm water, white - cold.
Water is poured in a little, after each addition they are tasted. This will prevent desalination of the drink due to excess liquid addition.
Combining alcohol and water, you should adhere to the optimal proportion - 1:3.
Correct - pour water into wine, wrong - vice versa.

If the result of dilution was the desalination of the drink, then you can add a couple of crystals of citric acid for acidification. It has been noticed that diluted wine becomes more aromatic.

You can reduce the sweetness of alcohol with mineral water. The result is a refreshing drink reminiscent of sparkling wine.

Blending

To remove cloying, sweet wine is combined with dry, made from grapes of the same variety. If there is no home-made blending material, then you can buy a suitable dry wine in the store.

Drinks are connected slowly, carefully. Taste after each blend 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 fix sweet wine, but add it as an ingredient to homemade cocktails as a substitute for liquor.

Re-fermentation

To reduce the sweetness, the drink is subjected to a second 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 completed. This is the most reliable way to save spoiled alcohol.

Prevention measures

For making homemade alcohol, you should choose not dessert, but less sweet wine grapes.

But it is much more important to follow the technological rules in the production process. Do not overdo it with the addition of water and sugar. It is extremely important to control the fermentation stage, when processed sugar forms a wine fortress. If too much sweetener is added to the wort, the fermentation reaction is completed before the drink reaches the desired level of sweetness.

Many temperate vineyards make the mistake of adding too much sugar to the must, hoping to make up for the lack of sweetness in the berries. Indeed, in adverse climatic conditions, grapes often ripen sour.

You can understand that the wine will turn out too sweet at the fermentation stage - by excessive production of carbon dioxide, the actively bubbling surface of the drink.

However, inexperienced winemakers rarely pay attention to such signs. It takes experience to properly measure the amount of sugar, and in the meantime, you must strictly follow the instructions for making wine.