Thank you, Jacob!
It's been a few years since I've made wine. I'm in the country right now, and the wine supplies and recipe book are back in town.
This is the book I use the most:
https://www.midwestsupplies.com/winemak ... 4AodcnoApQ
IIRC, we used Campden tablets at the beginning of the process, as a sanitizer, in the fruit during the initial stages. I'm trying to remember- it's been a few years- I think we added the Campden tablets to the crushed fruit and sugar and then added the yeast 24 hours later. Is that right? The Campden tablets had to dissolve and disperse so they wouldn't inhibit the yeast.
And we do add potassium sorbate as a stabilizer, but I can't swear that it was part of the pear wine recipe.
We have a specific gravity meter but it's the old school kind, the hydrometer thingy as opposed to a digital kind, and it makes me nuts. I struggle with reading the scale; I don't use it often enough to keep myself familiarized with the scale or with using it in general. I'd made a few batches of wine by the time I tried the pear wine, and I had made myself comfortable with the idea that I could judge when the wine had stopped fermenting by watching the air lock. When it hadn't bubbled for several days, it was done, right? Right?
We heat the house primarily with a pellet stove in the winter- and of course, pears come in right around Thanksgiving, maybe a couple of weeks before. So the house was cool when I started the pear wine, but not particularly cold. We usually keep the primary fermenter in the kitchen or in the laundry room just in case the initial fermentation is so exuberant that it blows through the lock. (One of my husband's wee heavies blew up a bedroom ceiling.) Once we move to a secondary fermenter, we move the carboy into another room to free up floor space in the kitchen.
Without even thinking about it, I moved the pear wine into a spare room that we were keeping closed, to keep the pellet stove heat in the portion of the house that we occupy the most. And the weather got cooler, and cooler... and eventually the air lock stopped popping.
I waited another week or so, and decided that the pear wine was done, so I bottled it up. Uh huh. I did that.
A specific gravity reading at the beginning and before bottling would have told the truth.
If I try it again, I'm going to leave the secondary in the room with the pellet stove until it stops bubbling in the air lock.
Maybe I'll even take a couple of specific gravity readings.
(Really need to get over my reluctance to deal with the hydrometer.) (I kept a salt water aquarium successfully for a couple of years without a skimmer. I had a chunk of live rock in there and I changed the water faithfully. I used a hydrometer- different type- every week successfully without garment rending, hair tearing or gnashing of teeth. Go figure.) (I no longer have that hydrometer. Darn it. But IIRC, I don't think the scale was the same.)