Is adding extra sugar really an necessary process for making wine at home?
Called Chaptalization, not only does it seem like cheating and cheapening the quality of wine, is it really necessary? All the wine recipes I find for making it at home call for literally pounds of sugar. Would using the right fruit at the right ripeness result in a good amount of alcohol?
What about for other berry fruits, apples, or pears?
Tagged with: alcohol • apples • berry fruits • home call • pears • wine recipes
Filed under: All Things Wine
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You would need to add more sugar if you are using table grapes or other fruit. Grapes traditionally used in making wine have a LOT more natural sugar. So if you have vinifera grapes at the appropriate ripeness, no you would not need to. But, if using non-vinifera grapes, you do need more sugar.
Sugar reacts with the yeast to create the ethanol we know and love.
Fructose & yeast = alcohol
Yeast needs sugar to ferment the juice into wine. Also, the more sugar you use, the drier the wine.
If you can get good fuirt you don’t need sugar. But unless you are growing your own it is pretty hard to get good enough fruit. Even if you are you are at the mercy of the weather and might end up using sugar some years.
its kind of complicated… probly if you want some real "quality wine" you should hold back on the unnatural sugar, but if your trying to get a little kick out of it, the other guy is correct in saying fructose+yeast = sugar its just how it works. anyway if your looking for the "correct" answer this probably is not the best place to get it.
The amount of sugar in the must determines the amount of alcohol in the finished wine. Most of the time, fruit needs a boost to get to the right strength. The sugar adds alcohol, not flavor. This holds for both grape and "country" wines. It is fairly rare to get good wine from just the fruit. An exception is honey wine or mead, which doesn’t use fruit at all in straight mead (as opposed to something like cyser, which uses apples).