Fortification, Sweetening, and Amelioration

To fortify, sweeten, and/or ameliorate your wine lot requires a few simple Volume Adjustments.

  • To add sugar or concentrate to juice or must in order to increase potential alcohol, please see our article on Chaptalization.
  • To add water to juice or must (while a juice lot is in tax class Fermenting Juice), please see our article on how to record a water addition.

Note: Wine, spirits, and concentrate must be in the correct declared tax class to populate the TTB report correctly. Lots still under the Fermenting Juice class will only affect Part VII of the report.

This article covers:

Fortification

To record the addition of brandy or spirits for fortification:

  1. Record a Volume Adjustment to remove the volume from the wine lot.
  2. Uncheck the box for archiving. You will need this lot to be active for Step 3.
  3. Record a Volume Adjustment to remove the required volume from your 'spirits' lot


  4. Record a Volume Adjustment to add the total volume after fortification

Don't forget to verify the alcohol content after the addition of wine spirits and change the tax class accordingly.


Sweetening

To add sugar or concentrate to juice or must in order to increase potential alcohol, please see our article on Chaptalization.

To record the addition of concentrate, juice, or sugar for sweetening:

  1. Record a Volume Adjustment to remove the volume from the wine lot.
  2. Uncheck the box for archiving. You will need this lot to be active for Step 3.
  3. Record a Volume Adjustment to remove the volume from the juice or concentrate lot.
    (Skip this step if you are adding sugar to your wine.)
  4. Record a Volume Adjustment to add the total volume after sweetening


Tip #1: To add sugar to a declared wine lot, start by recording an Addition action of sugar (Before step 1). Then follow the instructions above, skipping Step 2. Your sugar inventory is managed through the Dry Goods feature.

Tip #2: To track the costs of the juice or concentrate added to a wine lot for sweetening, we recommend tracking the juice or concentrate lot as an Additive, in addition to tracking it as a lot. After Step 3 above, record an Addition action for the volume of juice or concentrate used for sweetening. The cost of the 'additive' will then apply to the sweetening wine lot.

Tip #3: To include concentrate (or any sweetening material with the Tax Class Concentrate) as part of your wine composition, use a Transfer action or task to add volume  to your declared wine. Find out how to create a concentrate lot here. The TTB Report will show the starting volume of the wine on Part 1, Section A, Line 18 "Used for Sweetening", and the final volume of wine that had sweetening materials added to it on Part 1, Section A, Line 3 "Produced by Sweetening". Please note that this transaction is not supported in the TTB Audit Report. We recommend auditing these transactions using the Winery Activity Feed, sorting by transaction and tax class.

 

Amelioration 

To add water to juice or must (while a juice lot is in tax class Fermenting Juice), please see our article on how to record a water addition.

To increase the volume of a finished, declared wine lot due to a water add:

  1. Record a Volume Adjustment to remove the entire fill from the wine lot
  2. (Optional) Record a Custom Action (or assign a Custom Task in a work order)
  3. Record a Volume Adjustment to add the total gallons of the lot after the water addition


** Following these steps will report on Page 1, Columns (a), (b), and (c), lines 6 and 21,  of the 5120.17 TTB Report.