I just finished racking my wine to my secondary but I think I may have
left it to late. The SG is .998. I am also about 1 litre down in my
secondary. Should I top it up? It is a red kit wine (7L of
concentrate or 1.83 gal.) and it sat in the primary for 10 days at
about 23 degrees C (74 degrees F). Any help would be much
appreciated.

mekanickel,

By all means, top it up. Even better, find a container which holds the
exact volume, or a combination of containers. That way you don't need to
dilute or otherwise change the wine. You can also make up a small ullage
by adding clean glass marbles, though this complicates racking. In any
event, exclude almost every mililiter of air from the container (leave
some space for temp changes & expansion).
Too late? Not at all. As long as there are no off odors, you're in fine
shape.

Good Luck, Mike MTM

If you sulfited as the kit instructed, you're okay, but get rid of
that air as per MTM's suggestions.

Jack Keller, The Winemaking Home Page
http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/

A liter is more water than I would want to add to my wine to top up but you
need to do something. You could use a bottle of similar wine or you could
blow the air out with some inert gas. You can get spray cans of gas at wine
stores that are fine for this purpose. Blow the air out and quickly replace
the airlock. Then swirl the carboy a bit to cause CO2 to be released which
will further blow out any remaining air. Then do not open the carboy again
until it needs to be racked again. Do not monkey around with it or test it
for anything.

Ray

"mekanickel" > wrote in message
om...
> I just finished racking my wine to my secondary but I think I may have
> left it to late. The SG is .998. I am also about 1 litre down in my
> secondary. Should I top it up? It is a red kit wine (7L of
> concentrate or 1.83 gal.) and it sat in the primary for 10 days at
> about 23 degrees C (74 degrees F). Any help would be much
> appreciated.
>

I am thinking that if you are down a litre that you didn't have the
primary at 23 litres, and so it wouldn't be considered diluting the
product to top up with water... unless you left a lot of liquid in the
primary when you racked.