Dessert Wine

[Tim F]

I'm getting some muscat tomorrow and will be allowing extra to try to make some dessert wine. My rough plan was to take some juice and boil it down until the sugar was around SG 1.150 which would give 22% potential alcohol. The yeast I have tolerates about 15% alcohol so this would leave me (I think) about 1.050 (5%) sugar in the finished wine.

Anyone hazard a guess on whether this will work? Once concern was whether boiling would drive off or break down some amount of flavour in the juice. One other idea was to take half the juice, boil it down much further, then add to an amount of fresh juice so I get some of the fresh juice flavour and the sugar I need from the reduced juice.


ps I won't be surprised if my math is off, trying to keep tabs on a squawking baby as I type

 

[barls]

just be careful not so set the pectin as you will end up with jam. id be more inclined to ether add more sugar or freeze it then drain off the unfrozen portion rather than boil it off.

 

[Tim F]

I do have some pectin eating enzyme I could add in if that is an issue. Still from memory when making jam you need over 60% sugar for the pectin to set don't you?

Adding sugar isn't a bad idea though and might just go that way but I wondered if maybe I would get some caramelisation happening if I boiled it, and maybe get some nice toffee flavours in there?

 

[Greg.L]

Muscat grapes usually have very high sugar. They can easily get to 16baume so you wouldn't have to add much sugar. The dessert wines at rutherglen use spirit to help stop the fermentation, but they age it for many years in oak.

 

[Airgead]

I'd go for the sugar over the cooking as well. Not sure what cooked grape juice would taste like.

The other advantage is that you can dose it up slowly. Add sugar till you have about 17% potential and let that ferment out. That should overwhelm the yeast and leave it a bit sweet. If not add a bit more and ferment until the yeast is overwhelmed. Then add sugar till its at the level you want. I'm thinking it will be lower than 1.050. That sounds very sweet indeed to me. I'd be thinking maybe around 1.020 or thereabouts but I'm no expert winemaker.

Cheers
Dave

 

[Muggus]

To make high Beaume dessert wines there's a few ways to go about it...
- Leave them on the vine as long as physically possible, like they do in Rutherglen for muscat, and pick them 17+Be. Generally they'll be well raisined at this point, and produce the better wines.
- Let Botrytis get to it and dehydrate the grapes. Risky business, and HUGE pain in the ass to make the wine.
- Unlikely to happen anywhere in Australia, but let the grapes freeze on the vine, and process them whilst still frozen...good luck! haha
- Cordon cut...ie wait until the grapes get to a decent Be, then cut the arm/cane of the vine itself near the trunk, which means the leaves that arm only provide carbohydrates, ie sugars, to the grapes, and the grapes recieve no water from the roots, dehydrating them and concertrating sugars. Interesting technique, but you need your own vines to mess around with.
- Put the juice through a Reverse Osmosis machine and suck some of the water out of it...you have an RO handy?

All of which are a bit unfeasible...

- The most feasible option is however, freeze concertrate. Freeze the juice, remove the ice, ferment, etc. This will intensify the natural flavour and acidity (and VA ) in the wine.
- The option is back sweetening with juice. Crush/press the grapes and keep a portion of the juice sulfured up in an airtight container. Add this juice to the fermented juice and give it another good whack of sulfur, just to be sure.

 

[fawnroux]

G'day Tim,

Muscats are a fortified wine. If you are looking to make a dessert wines, like the ports, muscats, tokays etc, then maybe don't worry about reducing down the must etc to add sweetness. Fortifying wine basically means adding a spirit (usually brandy) to the fermenter to up the alcohol level so as to kill off the yeast. This why they are quite high in alcohol, yet still very sweet, as there is plenty of unfermented sugar in there. This used to be quite common as a means of preserving the wine back in the day. Now it's only the dessert wines that do it. Doing it the way you suggested might work, but seems a lot more work than needs to be done

If you reduce the must down, your going to get mosto or saba or vincotto (all very similar). Very delicious, especially on meats.

Dave

PS Where abouts are the grapes coming from? Do you know what baume they are?

 

[pokolbinguy]

Don't boil it, you will boil off the volatile aromatics of the must. Depending what baume the fruit comes in at your best option is to just stop the fermentation by adding sulphur when appropriate to keep sweetness and kill the ferment. Other option is to fortify it but spirit is expensive unless you have other means of acquiring it. If you want to fortify it then the initial sugar can be lower and then just ferment to the desired residual sugar level and bolster the alcohol with spirit. Bare in mind that alcohol masks sweetness so you need more residual sugar as the alcohol rises to have the same apparent sugar level (taste).

PM me and I will email you a excel spreadsheet to
help calculate spirit additions in relation to apparent sweetness etc

 

[Tim F]

PS Where abouts are the grapes coming from? Do you know what baume they are?

I just found them in the paper - guy at Loxton was picking and delivering a few different types for $1 a kilo so I couldn't check in advance. The grapes were a bit weird actually, pH was 4.1 but also not a ton of sugar. gravity was 1.094 so that's 12.5 beaume?

Anyway thanks all the the advice. I think I will be going the extra sugar route for my 'fortified' batch!

 

[fawnroux]

So how'd you go Tim?

 

[Tim F]

Well its finished primary, not too sure what it's going to be like though. Tastes bloody horrible right now but I guess thats to be expected at this stage . It fermented out to 1.000 so abv 14.5 or so, very dry and acidic too at pH 3.25. I used CY17 which apparently tolerates up to 15% abv. Hopefully this means I can add some sugar down the track without too much more fermentation happening but I think I will do that much later, closer to bottling.

 

[Tim F]

Well a month later I'm getting pretty excited about this wine. It's tasting really nice now that it's cleared up a bit. I'm starting to think about oak - does anyone have opinions whether oak is appropriate for a muscato? If so, french or american? I'm thinking french but if I can get a bit of vanilla character from American, that could be interesting. Either way I was going to go pretty low - like .5g/L at first - sound ok?

 

[ChrisECarpenter]

I think you'll find oak contact will dull off the nice musky fruit aromas from moscato - I definately wouldn't recommend it.

Chris

Well a month later I'm getting pretty excited about this wine. It's tasting really nice now that it's cleared up a bit. I'm starting to think about oak - does anyone have opinions whether oak is appropriate for a muscato? If so, french or american? I'm thinking french but if I can get a bit of vanilla character from American, that could be interesting. Either way I was going to go pretty low - like .5g/L at first - sound ok?