sugar in wine making

[Cellar_Rat]

oooer. Is it a different of much, can you give us some figures?

I am presuming this is dissolved in water only and the variance is not caused by other ingredients?

If you had a refractometer it would be interesting to read the Brix and see if they were the same.

For winemaking purposes, certainly for chaptalisation (topping up the SG by adding granulated) beet or cane does not make a difference.
However as the alcohol starts to get higher there is an earthy taste which comes with beet sugar, which is not there in cane sugar.

[Gaztops]

I don't have one of those refractometer, but beet sugar has 0.005 increase to cane sugar with the same amount. I know it is not a lot and could be down to mis-reading the hydrometer.

Gary

[oliver90owner]

but beet sugar has 0.005 increase to cane sugar with the same amount.

That would be for a wort rather than a must, then?

If that were the case there would surely be 0.010 or even 0.015 difference with typical wine musts which contain mostly added sugar?

Someone other than you would have noticed this situation previously, I would have thought, and after all these years it would have been widely documented and commented upon.

Can you do some tests and give us some practical results which could then be be verified by other forum members? I am not going to investigate this unless there is a sustantiable claim as I am not at all in agreement. As far as I am concerned, sugar is sugar is sugar where granulated is concerned. I don't have a bag of beet sugar to hand but I would be confident that the energy content for beet and cane derived sugars are exactly the same (they would not be the same, if more of one than the other were required for the same SG) Dextrose is normally supplied as the monohydrate so will have a lower energy content (and potential alcohol conversion) than sucrose which has no water of crystallisation.

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As far as the OP was concerned (back in 2008/9?), there may be a slight difference between fermenting sucrose and dextrose.

The simple facts are that when fermenting sucrose it will first be broken down to half dextrose and half fructose, then to alcohol. There may, under certain circumstances, be more stress on the yeast with the hydrolysis and the anaerobic metabolism to alcohol of sucrose over the simpler metabolism of an all dextrose ferment. Perhaps an interesting line of investigation for a potential uni student thesis - perhaps this was why wines were fermented more slowly in the past (at lower temperatures) in order to not stress the yeast as much (we know that high temperature turbo yeasts can produce off-tastes from high alcohol sugar washes - hence the use of chacoal/carbon filtering). All this is hypothesising, of course, and there may be no differences at all.