Tricks if your wine is too sweet

First, let's make one thing clear: There is no "anti"-sugar. Every trick we can use to make the wine less sweet will have side-effects.

Dilution

If you dilute your wine with water it will obviously get less sweet. The problem is that you also loose body and alcohol so you can only use this trick for small corrections. It works best on white wines since they have less body in the first place.

A loose rule of thumb: Don't dilute red wines. Dilute 25 litres of white wine with a maximum of 4 litres of water. In the white wine case, let's assume you have a hydrometer reading before adjustment of 1005. After adjustment you will have 1004.2 so you have only lost about one unit. Better than nothing though and you can combine it with other tricks below.

Dilution works best if you have very sweet wines. The reason is that since you use water (hydrometer value 1000), the dilution will work better the further away from 1000 you are to start with.

Another method is to dilute with a similar but very dry wine. In that case there is no upper limit - the more you add, the better.

For those who are interested - here is the mathematical explanation of the dilution (you can safely skip this part if you don't feel like it):

If you have X litres of wine, add Y litres of water, your hydrometer reading will change downwards as follows (H1 is old hydrometer value, H2 is new, lower value):

H2 = 1000 + (H1-1000)*(X-Y)/X

The formula looks complicated but it isn't really. If you look at the formula using Oechsle values instead it will suddenly make much more sense. Oechsle values are simply "how far from 1000 it is", i.e. a hydrometer value of 1012 means +12 Oechsle and 995 means -5.

Now, if you have say +10 oechsle and you dilute it with equal amounts of water (i.e. dilute to twice the volume) you will half the value to +5. If you dilute the volume from V1 to V2 (where V2 obviously is the larger) your Oechsle reading will be multiplied by V1/V2. So it is simply a case of proportional change. The reason the formula above looks complicated is that it is translated to the "normal" type of hydrometer readings.

Increase acidity

The more acidtidy you have in a liquid, the more "shocked" your tastebuds will be and this means they don't feel the more refined taste of the sugar. This trick can of course only be taken so far.

Rules of thumb:

Low bodied red wine (the cheap stuff) : Don't do it.

Full bodied red wine (our stuff of course) : You can possibly get away with an increase of 0.2 - 0.4 grammes of Citric Acid extra per litre.

White wines : A little bit more, try 0.3 - 0.6 g/litre.

Use Citric Acid, dilute it well and add it in many small steps. Remember there is no "anti"-acid (well, actually there is : adding chalk will do the trick but you will get an off flavour as well so use this trick only if you must). It is wise to try out on a small volume first and first when you are completely satisfied you add the Citric Acid to you entire fermenter.

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