If you want this to be dry, which is hard to achieve in a high alcohol wine,
you proabably should stop here.

Some comments on your deffinition of dryness. If you put alcohol in water
which will be perfectly dry, you will end up with a SG of considerably below
0.990. I have fermented 13% wines to below 0.990. If you have or are
aiming at 18-21% alcohol and defining dry as 1.000, you could end up with a
considerable amount of sugar in the wine. There has to be to counter the
low gravity of alcohol. You will probably have residual sugar of 2 to 4%.

Just some comments.

Ray


"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