Sweetening wine - when and how?

[TStarr]

My second puzzler - is how and when to sweeten wine? I sadly have more sweet teeth than the average Pooh bear - and want to make wine that is anything but dry. Do I sweeten before fermentation has finished, kill the yeast and bottle? or ferment down to death of yeast/alcoholic content required - and then camden and add sweetener to taste, before leaving to mature? or even do u sweeten after you open the bottle to drink it!?
On the assumption it is sweeten sometime before you leave it to mature, do u sweeten to how u want it to taste now, or over/under sweeten as it will change during maturing?
And for a bonus point - are there any non-sugar sweetners like Splenda that won't run any risk of re-fermentation, but that also taste good - and does anyone have preferences? Again. my thanks in advance.

[MKG]

In reverse order ...

Artificial sweeteners can be used if added at the time of drinking. If you add them before then, they tend to migrate to the bottom of the wine - that last glass would be ultra-sweet. Also, a lot of people (and I mean a lot) can detect a background bitterness in artificial sweeteners. There is, though, a plant which you can grow which is many times sweeter than sugar. There's a thread on here about it, but for the life of me I can't remember what it's called (Help, someone!!!!) - that may work for wine, but I've never tried it.

Now, how to make a sweet wine. The apparently obvious method is to add more sugar than yeast can ferment (and it used to be done like this when yeasts were much less efficient than they are today). Take a look at some of the old country wine recipes, a lot of which call for three and a half or even four pounds of sugar to a gallon. The yeast fermented what it could, but there would always be a lot of sugar left over - hence a sweet wine. The problem, though, was that no-one had any idea just where the yeast would stop, so the sweetness was a hitty-missy affair. Mind you, given the ingredients in some of those old recipes, you'd need a lot of residual sugar to make the wine at all drinkable. Nowadays, there's a different problem - yeasts are much better at fermenting sugar and you end up with a super-strength wine but still no way of assessing sweetness until it's too late. Lots of people think super-strength would be good, but they'd be wrong unless the wine was very heavily-bodied (i.e. about twice as many ingredients as normal). Definitely not the recommended method.

A slightly better method is stopping the wine when the desired alcoholic strength/sweetness ratio is achieved. You need to be a dab hand with a hydrometer to do this, both to accurately assess the starting gravity and to determine current alcoholic content. But, once again, how do you know how much sugar to use? It's very easy to end up with a sickly-sweet wine and, although you can always add sweetness, you can't take it out. Also, assessing the stopping point is not that easy - you have to pre-guess it. Stopping the yeast by adding Campden tablets and and potassium sorbate (wine stabiliser) - it takes both to do it properly - does not stop the fermentation. That, because the yeast has been busily secreting enzymes left, right and centre, carries on for a few days, making it easy to miss the point you were trying to achieve. Still not recommended, then.

Best method by far ...

Find a recipe for a dry wine, preferably a reasonably strong one (unless you like Lambrini ). Allow the wine to ferment to complete dryness. When the fermentation is apparently finished, add the Camden tablet and sorbate. If you decide to ignore that last step, you run the risk of a reactivated wine later. Allow the wine to stand until all activity has ceased and there is a healthy deposit at the bottom. Rack as normal, top up with water, and then leave the wine alone for as long as you've decided to let it mature. At that point, taste it and decide just how sweet you'd like it to be. Make up some sugar syrup and use this for sweetening, adding it a little (say, 4 fluid ounces) at a time, tasting at each addition, until the desired sweetness is achieved. As your wine has matured as far as you're going to allow it, there will be no marked flavour changes after that point (unless it's an overall smoothing of flavour). Put an airlock back over the wine and keep your eyes on it for a few days - even with the most careful winemakers, these things can sometimes spring back to life. When you're sure that the wine is stable, you can bottle it.

Easiest method of all ... develop a taste for dry wines

Mike

[frozenthunderbolt]

MKG it is called stevia - i grow it and eat it, it also has a slight bitter aftertaste!