How to deal with stuck wines or slow starters

[hypnoticmonkey]

my port was stuck at 1010. I was worried that the yeast was giving up as the alcohol must be about 14-15% by this point. I was using a high alcohol yeast with a tolerance of up to 18%, so I'd hoped it was just that it had got too cold, then the yeast had dropped out of suspension.

I'm currently trying the method above. got it fermenting nicely from 250ml to 500, 500 to 1L, 1L to 1.5L and 1.5L to 3L.

3L to 5L slowed down a bit, but still an active ferment going. I left it 72 hours due to the now slower pace in order to give the yeasties time to multiply.

Have just doubled up again, split it across two DJs and topped both up with 1DJ of stuck port. it's now really really slow, but still showing gradual signs of fermentation.

Will give it a couple of days and see how we get on. I've still got 5 more litres of stuck port to mix in with this, which might prove challenging.

Ideally I'd like to ferment to dry and back sweeten in order to keep the alcohol content high, but if I can get it to go down to 1000 I'll be content with the progress. Cold weather isn't exactly helping!

 

[Gorty]

I know I'm a newbie to the forum, and I suppose I must confess to being a newbie to wine making as I've only just started again after ....ahem years lost in the wilderness of supermarket wine aisles, but I was pleased that Godfrey mentioned Tronozymol.

In a past life when I was making wine from everything and anything, as long as it was as free as I could get it, stuck ferments seemed to be something you accepted as part of wine making and I tried all sorts of alchemy that I had read or been told about, some worked... some didn't.

I then was in my local homebrew store, back in the days when we had one, talking to the guy who ran it and he recommended using Tronozymol, I will admit that I was a little sceptical, as it was expensive, was this a ploy to get me to pay for his next holiday? Okay, by expensive I mean that I had to pay for it....or more than I usually did.

He assured that it would work and as he always had about twenty DJs going in the shop at any one time and definitely looked like he had sampled every kit and type of wine and beer there was in his shop, 'Er Indoors forced my pudgey little fist open and made me buy it (sob! it still upsets me!)

I tried this latest alchemy and ...well let's just say that it was a bit like injecting the elixir of life, it could have brought the dead back to life, well the long and the short of it was I realised that it would have stopped me throwing away quite a few stuck ferments in the past, and I used it for every wine and beer from then on and never had another stuck ferment.
It was good stuff then, I hope it's just as good now.