The must - or juice before you add the yeast will be somewhere between say 1.090 and 1.050 depending on how much sugar is in the juice- where 1 lb of sugar dissolved in 1 gallon of water will have a gravity of about 1.040). If you buy a $7 tool called an hydrometer (it works through its buoyancy) and use that to measure the amount of sugar that has not yet been fermented (the metric is known as specific gravity: where the specific gravity of pure water is 1.000. Watching a clock or a calendar is not really very helpful, in my opinion. Wine and fermentation involve organic processes, not mechanical, so just like children and their development fermentation dances to its own internal drum beat. That is a great way to learn how wine changes as it ages.Ī few days. and don't be afraid to taste your wine as it develops. You can do that with sanitized glass marbles or with more grapefruit juice or with fruit juice and sugar or ?Īnyway. Now each time you siphon (rack) the wine you are going to lose some volume and you want to find some way to keep the vessel filled into the mouth of the carboy (or vessel). After six months or more the wine should be quite clear even without straining. Again, I am sure that in the class you learned to rack (siphon) this wine every 60 - 90 days into a similar sized vessel with an airlock and that it is probably wise to rack the wine onto a crushed campden tablet (this releases some SO2 gas and that gas inhibits oxidation). If you siphon the wine into the secondary vessel then a great deal of the fruit and dead yeast get left behind and in the secondary, as the gas - the CO2 - produced by the yeast slowly leaves the wine then more and more of the fruit particles drop to the bottom as sediment (lees). I assume in the class they explained how you need to transfer the wine to a container with an airlock when the specific gravity drops near 1.000 (so you are looking to transfer the wine when the gravity reads about 1.010 or 1.005 or thereabouts). That said, what you want is a hydrometer. The solution may be to sweeten the wine with sugar or honey or agave syrup or maple syrup after all the fermentation has ended and all the yeast has been removed (the process is called stabilization and back sweetening). I have never tried making grapefruit wine but wines I have made from oranges are very tart. I think that you might find your wine very tart indeed. Hi Traceyyt, Grapefruit wine is going to be rather interesting. I then rack the batch to get it off the sediment and then finish clearing, treating, sweetening, etc. It stays in the secondary until it finishes fermenting and most of the sediment has settled. I usually move my batches from primary to secondary when the wine is about half way to 2/3 done fermenting. If you're happy with the flavor extraction, I would strain the batch and put only the liquid in the secondary. I'd take a small taste of the batch in the primary (don't worry, it won't hurt you). Keep in mind that the sugars will be fermenting out, so don't expect it to taste sweet. Some fruits have bitter seeds (apples, strawberries, cherries) and if you leave the seeds in the primary too long, the wine picks up a bitter taste. Almost like making tea, if you leave the tea bag in longer, you're likely to get a stronger tea. Deciding when to remove the solids from the liquid is sometimes an factor of how much flavor extraction you want. There are even some bitter elements to it.
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