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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Is it hard to actually have low sugar dry wine?
No. Lots of sweet wines are fermented until dry. Then they add potassium metabisulfite to kill the yeast, then "back sweeten" the wine by adding sugar once the yeast is dead.
Such a waste of perfectly good wine :/
Back sweetening doesn't have to be to make it super sweet. Sometimes wine will ferment very dry and is beyond as dry as what you wanted. Other than adding straight sugar, more unfermented juice can also be added to enhance the flavor to either just make it sweeter or to add some of the non-fermented flavor back in that is lost. You can also have wine that produced a higher ABV than was desired, and adding water or juice can dilute it down.
Blending and balancing wine is really the hard part of making wine, especially if you're after a consistent product. Different pieces of fruit have different sugar levels and different yeast does more or less than you intend it to do, so the good wine makers can nudge that end product into what they actually wanted without ruining it.
Champagne is made by using low sugar grapes, fermenting until there is no residual sugar, and then ageing in barrels.
All the sweetness in Champagne is artificial, its made by adding sugar syrup to the bottle before the secondary fermentation used to create the bubbles.
I wonder if Tropicana was based on this with their "flavor paks"
That sounds like the same principle to me. They need it to taste fresh and orangey and just like last year's Tropicana even if it was the best or worst year ever for growing oranges or customers are gonna be upset. Can't buy from one farm this year and need to buy from one in a totally different place where the oranges might be another variety or just have a different flavor from different soil? Give it a nudge back toward that brand flavor profile. That consistency is what people like about name brands especially.
They didn't do that.
They just used high sugar grapes like gordo blanco, the yeast would go dormant once the alcohol content had got to about 14% and there would still be lots of sugar left.
Now they ferment up to the level of alcohol they want, then refrigerate the must, which makes the yeast go dormant and form hard shells so it can be filtered and centrifuged out.
If you killed the yeast while still active, the cells will rupture and the wine will taste like marmite.
It was common in the new world to create "sweet wines" by adding pure alcohol to the must, which would cause the yeast to become dormant, and then filter it out. This was how "white port" was made. Since the invention of refrigerated brine jackets, this method has been abandoned.
Interesting to know about the white port process as we've drank a bottle of that recently for the first time.
Your knowledge is beyond mine on the subject. I mostly made various country wines, usually just a half gallon or gallon at a time to experiment with yeasts and to practice balancing.
That's why I think it's probably unfair to think ancient brewers made crap. I mean, like any business, I'm sure some did, but if they were taking food to make it, it had to be worth it for most of history, and it doesn't take a lot of high tech stuff to make a palatable drink.
Low ABV drinks have kept people safe and happy for a long time, and I feel a majority of those people at least tried to be artisans like any other tradesman. Consistency and storage was probably the biggest difference, especially before the hydrometer, but with basic cleanliness and a few brews under your belt, I think someone in the day could have made something decent with nothing else.