After Stabilizing?

I have 10 gallons of Tart cherry wine that has been in the carboy for 7 months now. Now I'm going to stabilize it with the sorbate and metabisulphite. My question is should I let this stabilize for a couple days before I start to backsweeten the wine to taste? Or can I stabilize, sweeten, and bottle all in the same day? Also whats a good method to back sweeten a tart cherry wine? This is my first batch of cherry and I'm still learning how to tweek my recipe for this type of wine.

Thanks,
Andy Foster

afoster said:

I have 10 gallons of Tart cherry wine that has been in the carboy for 7 months now. Now I'm going to stabilize it with the sorbate and metabisulphite. My question is should I let this stabilize for a couple days before I start to backsweeten the wine to taste? Or can I stabilize, sweeten, and bottle all in the same day? Also whats a good method to back sweeten a tart cherry wine? This is my first batch of cherry and I'm still learning how to tweek my recipe for this type of wine.

Thanks,
Andy Foster

Click to expand...

I'd stabilize and let that sit for three days. Then sweeten and let it sit for three days. THEN, if no additional lees fall and no fermentation starts up again, I'd bottle it.

For cherry wine, I really like a bit of honey and just regular sugar in a simple syrup to sweeten the wine. A bit of honey really 'brightens' and smooths the flavor.

One thing that you may already know, so sorry if I'm repeating something you know but I think it's important on wines that may be aged a little- the wine seems to taste a bit sweeter in the bottle with a little bit of time. Especially a wine like cherry that loses some of its hotness and harshness pretty quickly. So what I'd do is to take a couple of samples and sweeten them a bit differently- say, one to 1.008, one to 1.010, one to 1.014. See which one you like best, and then sweeten to just under the one you prefer. So, if you love it at 1.012, for example, sweeten the whole batch to 1.010.

I don't know why exactly this happens, but I've had oversweetened wines by sweetening it right to where I wanted it.

Thanks Yooper that is exactly all the information I needed.