If you sweeten the wine without stabilizing it, and then bottle it; you
could end up with bottle bombs if fermentation starts again. This happened
with one of my batches - I had Champaign-like wine. I was lucky, I had a
small mess (only 2 bottles popped at the bottom of my wine rack), and
realized rather quickly what had happened to prevent a bigger mess. I've
heard of many horror stories on this site from wine starting to ferment
again in the bottles. If you don't use the wine stabilizer (sorbate), and
there is yeast left in the wine it will start to ferment again if you add
sweetener. I wouldn't classify the wine as ruined, it will just start
fermenting again and you would have a slightly higher alcohol content, and
the wine will take longer to ferment to dry. I stabilize all my wine now
especially when I want to sweeten the wine a bit. It doesn't take cleaning
up popped wine bottles (with wine all over the place)once before deciding to
never want to do that again. Others may like living on the wild side...but
not me.
Darlene

> wrote in message
oups.com...
> If a wine ferments dry to .992 and I wanted to sweeten it up a bit but
> for whatever reason did not sorbate to prevent refermentation what is
> likely to happen?
>
> If fermentation starts again is the wine ruined,...degraded? Or could
> this process be done over a long period of time until eventually the
> yeast was entirely used up and residual sugar would be present to
> finish off dry?
>
> Does fermentation starting back up cause any problems other than a
> longer process?
>
> John F
>