hi jim! we made two 18% peach wines & 17% pear/raisin wine. if you think
you're in the 18% range, I'd stop adding sugar now. the first peach dried
out nicely w/o probs & resembled an entre deux mers in character. the pear
wine stalled @ around 15 and we had a dickens of a time restarting it.we
ended up using Turbo yeast as a last resort. it finished @ 1.000 but all
remarked on a background fruityness. The 2nd peach stalled @ 1.01 & we
decided to let it be: it made a nice dessert wine with a sneaky kick & a
dirty hangover. we used lalvin 1118 which was rated to 18%.I'd say let it
be & watch it dry out.... HTH, regards, bobdrob


"jim" wrote in message
...
I wondered if anyone had advice on the following matter...

I am making a rice-wine and I'm using gervin gv26 yeast. It states the
capability to reach ~21% vol and my intention is to get as close to that
percentage as I safely can. I want the wine to ferment out dry, so while
this is an experiment, I don't want to push it too far and find myself
high and (not) dry.

So far, the 5UKGallon wine has had 10.45KG (23 lbs) of sugar which would
seem to put it somewhere north of 18.5% alcohol - assuming it ferments to
sg 1.000. Today, for the first time so far, the fermentation seems to
have slowed slightly.

I have been tracking the SG drops, but with some anomalies (for example
addition of 3 litres of water some time after starting didn't seem to
change the SG - perhaps due to post addition aggitation adding straining
bag contents back into the liquid). Annoyingly I didn't take a pre-sugar
SG. If the SGs were all believable the wine would already have made a
0.182 drop making the wine ~25.5% which is clearly erroneous)

The question is when to stop feeding the wine with more sugar. I don't
want to push it till it will ferment no further as I will end up with
residual sugar. I am happy to stop where I am if it is the only way to
achieve my 'dry' goal. The ~5UKGallon batch had 55g of minavit nutrient to
work with - a compromise on the amount stated to achieve full potential.

Does anyone have any experience of this kind of scenario or vaguely
similar which I can use to extrapolate likely success with further sugar
additions?

Many thanks for any advice,

Jim