Joy of Home Wine Making (24 page)

This wine doesn’t have a lot of body, but it’s very nice. Some use it as a table wine.

If you can get wild strawberries, well, you are a very lucky person, and you should invite me over.

3½ quarts or so of water

2 lbs. of sugar or 2 lbs. light honey (highly recommended)

4 lbs. ripe sweet strawberries, fresh or frozen

1 tsp. acid blend OR juice of one large lemon

¹
/
₈
tsp. tannin

1 tsp. yeast nutrient

1 Campden tablet, crushed (optional)

½ tsp. pectic enzyme

1 packet champagne or Montrachet yeast

Boil most of the water and all of the sugar or honey, and skim, if necessary.

Wash and stem the berries. Pick them over and cut out any bad parts. Put them in a nylon straining bag and into the bottom of a
primary fermenter. Squash the strawberries with your clean hands or a sanitized potato masher. You’ll get a frothy pink substance.

Pour the hot water and sugar over the fruit. See if you need to add the rest of the water to make up the gallon, allowing for the bulk of the fruit, of course. When cooled, add acid, tannin yeast nutrient, and the Campden tablet if you choose to. Cover and fit with an air lock. Twelve hours after the Campden tablet, add the pectic enzyme. If you don’t use the tablet, merely wait until the must cools down to add the pectic enzyme.

Twenty-four hours later, add the yeast. Stir daily.

After a week, lift out what remains of the fruit, and let the bag drain. Do not squeeze the bag. When the wine settles, check the PA. If it is above 3 to 4 percent, let it continue for another week or so, then rack the wine off into a glass secondary fermenter, with a little boiled water if you have to. Bung and fit with an air lock.

Rack the wine again in the next two to six months, and wait for it to ferment out and clear. I like strawberry wine very dry. If you would prefer it sweetened a little, then stabilize it, add 2 to 6 ounces of sugar in a bit of water, and bottle it. Keep it six months to a year. Serve chilled. Excellent for Saint Valentine’s Day.

TOMATO WINE

Tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables. Use tomatoes that are dead ripe and locally grown—otherwise, don’t bother. I make no guarantees on this one, because some people just can’t get beyond the idea of tomato wine, but hey, you might be surprised.

3½ quarts or so of water

2 lbs. of sugar or 2 lbs. light honey

4 lbs. ripe tomatoes, red or yellow

2 tsp. acid blend

¹
/
₈
tsp. tannin

1 tsp. yeast nutrient

1 Campden tablet, crushed (optional)

½ tsp. pectic enzyme

1 packet champagne or Montrachet yeast

Boil most of the water and all of the sugar or honey, and skim, if necessary.

Wash the fruit. Look the tomatoes over and cut out any bad
parts as you cut them into chunks over a bowl. Put them in a nylon straining bag and into the bottom of a primary fermenter with any juice caught in the bowl. Squash the fruit with your clean hands or a sanitized potato masher.

Pour the hot water and sugar over the fruit. See if you need to add the rest of the water to make up the gallon, allowing for the bulk of the tomatoes, of course. When cooled, add acid, tannin, yeast nutrient, and the Campden tablet if you choose to. Cover and fit with an air lock. Twelve hours after the Campden tablet, add the pectic enzyme. If you don’t use the tablet, merely wait until the must cools down to add the pectic enzyme.

Twenty-four hours later, add the yeast. Stir daily.

After a week, remove what remains of the fruit, and let the bag drain into the primary fermenter. Don’t squeeze. When the wine settles, check the PA. If it is above 3 to 4 percent, let it continue for another week or so, then rack the wine off into a glass secondary fermenter, with a little boiled water if you have to.

Rack the wine again in the next two to six months, and wait for it to ferment out and clear. The color of the wine varies from a red gold to gold. Tomato wine is better when sweetened a little, so stabilize it and add 2 to 4 ounces of sugar in a bit of water, and bottle. Keep six months to a year. Serve chilled.

A GENERAL NOTE ON FRUIT WINES

You can find all sorts of fruits I haven’t mentioned here, many of them wild. By now, you should get the general gist of things. Decide which of these recipes uses a fruit most like the one you have, remembering that sweetness and acid content are the most important things. Then use that recipe for whatever fruit you have picked. You can’t go very wrong, honest.

DESSERT WINES

Almost any of the above recipes can be made into a dessert wine. Dessert wines are thicker, fruitier, and sweeter than regular table or social wines. The darker, richer fruits are better in this mode, but the heavier light fruits can be good too.

Use a half pound to one pound extra fruit in the recipe, and when you get ready for the secondary fermenter, add a half pound more sugar or honey. You’ll have to rack the wine an extra time before it clears. Stabilize and sweeten it when you bottle it.

CHAPTER SIX

Wines from Canned Fruits, Concentrates, and Dried Fruits

A
very good thing about canned fruits is that they are available all year round. If you have missed part of the fresh fruit season or can’t get a particular fruit in your area, canned fruit might be an option for you once in a while. Another plus is that the fruit has already been processed for you. There is no pitting, seeding, or peeling involved. You don’t have to clean up a mess afterward. Recycle your cans, please.

While wine made with canned fruit won’t taste as fresh and vibrant as wine made with fresh or frozen fruit, it will still be good.

Much depends on how good the fruit was when it went into the can in the first place. A peach isn’t just a peach. There are many varieties of peach. Some are better suited to tasting good in a can. Some are more suited to looking good in a can. The ripeness of the fruit, how it has been handled, and the quality of the processing at the cannery all have a lot to do with the result.

I used to buy peaches and pears from an orchard near my house that had been rejected by the cannery as too big for its machinery. My canned peaches and pears were superb (at ten cents a pound). So was the brand that bought the orchard’s output. They always picked at the perfect time, and the cannery was only a few miles away. Alas, time has passed, and the orchard and cannery are no more. I sure wish I had known how to make wine in those days!

In most cases there are two ways to go: to the grocery store or to the wine supply store.

FRUIT WINE BASES AND CONCENTRATES

Most wine supply houses have what they call fruit wine bases and concentrates. These usually consist of ripe fruit canned in its own juices or in water. One can is usually enough to make five gallons of wine. It was canned with winemaking in mind and comes with instructions right on the label. I’ve made a few of these, and they came out just fine (although the starting PA frightened me a bit.) Some fifteen to twenty varieties are available.

So far, blackberry, marionberry, and gooseberry are my favorites because those fruits are hard to get in my area. If you aren’t paying postage, the price is quite reasonable.

GROCERY STORE CANNED FRUITS

The grocery store has fruits and juices in an amazing array. You can buy little tiny cans of fruit and giant food service-sized cans. You can buy fruit canned in its own juices or in water.

Generally, I would say that using canned juices isn’t worth the trouble. I prefer to work with frozen juices, which we covered back in chapter 2. Sometimes, though, canned juices might be all that’s available. If so, refer back to chapter 2.

Be open to experiment. For one thing, you don’t have to make batches bigger than one gallon if you don’t want to. You might find good wine fodder on sale. (“No one wants these plums, let’s try putting them out dirt cheap!” Bingo!)

There are a few things to keep in mind. If the canned fruit on sale is a brand you aren’t familiar with, buy one can and taste it. If it is mostly syrup and not much fruit, you won’t get much flavor in the resulting wine. If it’s high in fruit content and you like the taste, check the PA or SG carefully. Figure out what kind
of dilution and additional sugar you will need to make a gallon. Remember that suspended fruit particles can make the SG seem much higher than it really is.

Also remember that can sizes vary seemingly at the whim of the Can Fairy. Can sizes used to be fairly standard. Nowadays you will find cans of fruit that look at first glance to hold 16 ounces, only to discover upon further examination (right after you open all the cans, most likely) that the can really contains 15½ ounces or 14, or even 19.

Don’t worry. A few ounces here and there won’t make much of a difference. If the portions you buy are a slightly different size from what I talk about here, it’s OK!

The “Oregon” brand that is usually in the fancy part of the canned fruit section is just about the best you can buy for “small” fruits such as berries. The price can take your breath away, but even so, two tins will make a remarkably good gallon of wine.

There are some very interesting imported canned fruits, though you should
ALWAYS
taste before using. I’ve eaten canned lychee fruit quite cheerfully, but I have never made wine from it. For all I know it would be delish, but I just have a bad feeling that canned lychees were not meant to be made into wine. Ditto for durian.

Sometimes the canning standards in other countries aren’t up to what you might be used to. The U.S. government inspects shipments that come into the States, but they can’t check every can. So that’s your job. If you don’t like the way it smells or looks, don’t use it.

Avoid canned fruit that is labeled “pie filling.” It has less fruit, more sugar, and thickeners that are best avoided.

Always read the label. I fully expect one day to find something labeled “pineapple” in large letters and in teeny-tiny letters under it: “Shaped rings of solidified food starch with pineapple and other natural flavors in a syrup of imitation sugar with even more natural flavors augmented with unnatural flavors and a vitamin in every can.”

NOTE: If you want to make more than one gallon, go ahead—multiply everything but the yeast by the number of gallons you plan to make (one packet of yeast is good for one to five gallons). It’s a good idea to write the amounts in pencil or on a separate piece of paper so you don’t forget to multiply one or two ingredients, as I have frequently done.