Well I threw caution to the wind and added more sugar and water to fill the carboy up so oxidation doesn't occur. It's now bubbling again with a secondary fermentation. I just hope I didn't make the wine to sweet or too thin (weak).
Sue

I don't think you have a problem at all. Depending on the original amount of fig you may have diluted it a bit but you may end up with a wine that is more subtle in flavor and able to drink it earlier. I wouldn't worry about it being too sweet either - since it's still fermenting you can continue to add the sugar / water mix until the alcohol tolerance of the yeast is reached and you won't have any more residual sweetness. The only thing is that it will take a bit longer to age out the "hot" flavor of the alcohol.

You can either continue to feed it as you rack or let it go still after racking and taste it after it drops clear to see if you need augementation on the flavor side. FYI, I've never managed to rack a wine in 7 days ... normal for me is a couple of weeks minimum or whenever I see a heavy sediment forming at the bottom and I've left meads on the lees as long as 6 months without degradation in taste. If you're using commercial wine yeast it's substantially more stable than beer yeast and additional time on the skins of figs shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks, Makalu, I feel a bit better at what I am doing. After adding the additional gallon of sugar water and waiting for the secondary fermentation to settle down, the wine is starting to clear. The alcohol brix is only 5%. Hopefully it will come up closer to 12.5%? Should I continue to add sugar to feed the yeast, increasing the alcohol level or will the alcohol content naturally increase with time?
Sue

Sue  the short answer is IÂd stop and taste it first before adding anything else since I think IÂd need a few more of your brix readings to correlate with the readings of 9% and 5%. I'm pretty sure brix readings drop as you ferment (like specific gravity) and you want your final brix reading around 0 for a wine in the semi-dry range.

The much longer answer is that the alcohol content will only increase as long as a fermentation is taking place ... it stops when the yeast converts all available sugar, the yeast dies off once they reach their alcohol tolerance or the conditions (such as very high or low temperatures, etc.) stop them. If itÂs clearing and showing 5 brix, thatÂs a bit on the sweet side if I remember brix  IÂd first probably get a wine thief and taste it before doing anything else to get an idea of where itÂs at since normal fermentations start with high brix numbers and ferment down to around 0 or less.

YouÂve actually done a couple of different things that impact the final alcohol content of your wine  youÂve increased the total fermented volume by adding water and increased the amount of available fermentation material by adding sugar and youÂre going to have to account for both additions if you want to know exactly what the end result is.

Did you happen to take a reading of the original must before you added the yeast and do you remember how many pounds of sugar you put in that gallon of water? If so, you can get a pretty good idea of the current percent alcohol through this (hopefully not too confusing) example:

Once you start feeding a must you have to start tracking each incremental change in brix (or specific gravity) in order to get the overall alcohol content of the wine and you need measurements at the start and end of each stage. For example, let's say that your starting brix is 15 (sg 1.061) and at your first racking it is at brix 0 (sg 1.000). Brix start-end = 15-0= 15. Then you add sugar that brings the brix back up to 7 (sg 1.028) and it ferments down to 1 (sg 1.004) by the time you're ready to rack again. Brix start-end = 7-1 = 6. You add even more sugar to the mix and to bring the brix back up to 9 (sg 1.036) and it drops until brix 0 where it finally stops and fully clears. Brix start-end = 9-0= 9. At the end of all this you end up going through a drop of 15+6+9 = 30 brix points and the final alcohol of the wine comes out around 16% alcohol (I think the brix to alcohol factor is around .535). This whole thing does not take into account the amount of water that you had added but if you know the pounds of sugar itÂs pretty to take the pounds per gallon of sugar and convert that into potential alcohol and then just use additive volumes to get to the final result. Sorry for the long reply  I think my fingers got ahead of me!

The best way to handle this is to have some gallon jugs around and use those instead of a 5 gallon carboy if you can't fill the carboy up all the way. Adding water dilutes the wine and increases the PH. Diluting your fruit produces a so-so wine without proper nose,color, or bouquet.

Well, well, well, I thought I had ruined the fig wine. It was my first try making wine so I wasn't too discouraged. Surprise! I tasted the wine last month and it wasn't half bad. It was actually drinkable! The alcohol percent was not high but the color was very nice, a dark rose. So I will definately try again this year.
Thanks to all for their advice and help.
Sue