Another issue, it's very cloudy. I wasn't able to rack it for 7 days when the instructions said to rack in 3-5. Did this ruin it? I did check the SG and it's reading only 9% alcohol. I haven't tested the acid level yet...tonight's task.

Sue

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.

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 it’s clearing and showing 5 brix, that’s a bit on the sweet side if I remember brix – I’d first probably get a wine thief and taste it before doing anything else to get an idea of where it’s at since normal fermentations start with high brix numbers and ferment down to around 0 or less.

You’ve actually done a couple of different things that impact the final alcohol content of your wine … you’ve increased the total fermented volume by adding water and increased the amount of available fermentation material by adding sugar and you’re 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 it’s 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!