2013 Merlot-Cherry Stuck Fermentation

My 2013 Melbec/Cherry, which itself arose from the sad story of a broken demijohn, hardly fermented at all in the last five months. It is still sweet.

I tried restarting it with Yeast Energizer and a new packet of dry yeast twice.

I got desperate and read up on restarting wine, and learned that the pH should be 3.5-4.5.

I bought a cheap pH meter last year for this sort of problem, but I convinced myself that it did not work, and I threw it out. That left me with pH paper. My pH paper said the pH was over 5.

I decided to add the juice of seven clementines. The same clementines that I used in the mead a few weeks ago. The internet suggested one lemon for every two gallons, so I needed three in my six gallon batch.

I got some new Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast and spinkled it into some luke warm sugar water (about 1/2 cup with 2 T of sugar.) When it was foaming, I added some wine to it, about 1/4 cup. When that was foaming I added more.  When that was foaming, poured it in to the demijohn.

The third idea was to warm the demijohn. It is winter, and it is probably 68F in the basement. I got my seed starting mats used them to mildly warm the wine. Careful to allow headspace when you warm wine, since it will expand.

The next morning, it had foamed up, and was bubbling. The flavor was noticeably less sweet in just a few hours.

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Sept 2014: For a second time, I took a liter of my heavily fermenting new wine, and added to about 20 L of the stopped wine. This time it made a difference. When I tasted it in March 2015, the flavor had normalized, and it was not too sweet. :-)