How To Make Homemade Wine With Low Alcoholic Content

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.

Many people prefer their wines semi-sweet to sweet. Thankfully, the wines most recipes are based on in wine books keep well because they contain large enough amounts of alcohol to destroy yeast or bacteria that may remain. So the challenge lies in producing a sweet wine with a low alcohol content.

The primary goal 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 strait out. Often wine will be dry if you use less than two pounds of sugar in one gallon. If two gallons are being made, always double the amount of sugar. For example, if 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.