Making Low Alcohol Content Homemade Wines

You may be surprised to find that a high percentage of alcohol is not everything. Many various wines are made in the range of eight to eleven percent of alcohol at the lower end. Some wines made with the recipes based by the book, of course, while wines made by the recipes in most winemaking books are a good deal stronger than others made by brand names.

It makes sense that a good percentage of alcohol ensures that wines keep well for a longer period of time. Sometimes a stray spore of yeast, either left in the wine or contaminated, will begin to reproduce and live on the sugar present. The only way to avoid this is to make a homemade wine that is extremely dry in nature. But, not all people like dry wines.

A good number of people enjoy wines to be medium to medium sweet or even sweet. Many wines based on the recipes found in winemaking books keep well because they contain enough alcohol to destroy any yeast or bacteria that may reach them and provided if plenty alcohol has been reached, and if all procedures have been followed this will have been achieved. The difficult challenge is making a low alcohol sweet wine.

Your aim in making low alcohol wines is to add just enough sugar to make the amount of alcohol needed and to allow the wine to ferment right out. The wine will be dry if you use less than two and a quarter pounds of sugar in one gallon. Note: if two gallons are being made, double the amount of sugar. Suppose you have decided on making wine of ten percent of alcohol, the amount of sugar must be one pound fourteen ounces per gallon.

Feel free to try it. Take any recipe in your book and use one pound and fourteen ounces of sugar. One side note of importance is that if invert sugar is being used, it contains some moisture, so for every pound of household sugar, you must use one and a quarter pounds of the invert sugar. Also, invert sugar is sold in tins containing seven pounds. Sometimes weighing this proves awkward. It may be easier to dissolve it and consider that one pint represents two pounds of sugar.