Joy of Home Wine Making (27 page)

While canned fruits rarely have chemical preservatives in them, many dried fruits have been treated with sulfur, glycerin, and other additives. This may or may not be a plus, depending on your tastes. For example, a sulfured apricot retains its orange color and has a brighter flavor than an unsulfured apricot. It’s softer and plumper, and easier to get the flavor and sugars to release. This method of preservation is considered safe; however some people prefer to avoid any preservatives.

Most dried fruit can be reconstituted by soaking it in water, but it will never come close to resembling the fruit in its fresh state.

However, dried fruit has a rich, dark flavor of its own: the natural sugar of the fruit is very concentrated. A small amount of dried fruit added to a regular fresh fruit recipe can change its character considerably. It provides more body and a warmer, perhaps deeper, tone of flavor, as well as extra sugar. Raisins are especially good for producing this effect. Yeasts love raisins and all that nice grape sugar. We’ll get further into the nuances in the advanced section in chapter 10.

Think of what a fresh Thompson grape tastes like (Thompsons are commonly sold in supermarkets as “green” grapes). Now think about what a normal raisin tastes like. Very different, yet still related. Just as you can find different kinds of grapes in the market, you can find different kinds of raisins. There is the regular sort of raisins, generically labeled “raisins.” There are golden raisins, made from white grapes; muscat raisins made from the sweet, luscious muscat grapes; and currants. Unless you have currant bushes and dry them yourself, I’m sorry to say you can’t get real dried currants. The “currants” you buy in the grocery are merely small raisins.

It’s also easy to find prunes (dried prune plums), apricots, peaches, apples, dates, pears, pineapples, and sometimes mango, sweet and sour cherries, blueberries, and cranberries. In fancy grocery stores I’ve also seen dried star fruit and kiwi. Beware: some of these last fruits have sugar and oil added to them to improve their flavor and to soften them. The sugar is OK, but the oil is not!

It’s best to read the label carefully and be cautious. Don’t use any dried fruit that has oil added to it. For instance, most dried bananas have a LOT of oil added to them because they are fried. Any amount of oil will show on the top of your wine and may go rancid.

I’ve used organic and nonorganic, sulfured and unsulfured dried fruits, and I have had good results with all of them. So suit yourself. Do remember to buy the best-quality dried fruit you can. Elderly, dusty fruit isn’t going to be any better as wine. Fresh, tender dried fruit is preferable to wizened and hard. Always rinse the fruit lightly and check for foreign substances or the very occasional sign of insect damage.

To get untreated fruit you usually have to go to a whole foods store or a co-op. You will probably find both sulfured fruit and unsulfured fruit, as well as organic. The choice is yours. You can buy the fruit in bulk and get exactly as much as you need, sometimes at a much cheaper price than you’d pay for the boxed stuff at a normal grocery store.

Another way to obtain dried fruit is to dry it yourself. In hot, dry climates this is easy. For the rest of us there are inexpensive home dehydrators.

You can dry almost anything, it turns out, but it’s best to plan in advance how you’ll use the fruit.

Many people have a fruit tree or two that cheerfully overproduces. If you have a surplus of fruit, not much freezer space, and all your wine bins are going, you might want to consider drying some of your excess fruit for future use.

Another place to get dried fruit is the wine supply store. Most carry dried elderberries, rose hips, and dried banana flakes. The dried banana flakes sold in wine supply houses have no oil in them. Dried elderberry wine is a treasure.

A wine made with dried fruit tastes something like sherry to most people. True sherry is made by a special process, with a special yeast, in the Jerez area of Spain. It is fortified with extra alcohol so that it will keep for the longer period of time necessary to age it properly. The Flor yeasts used to make sherry also have an effect different from that of most other wine yeasts, tolerating a slightly higher level of alcohol before they are killed off by their own by-product. The barrels of wine are stored for long periods of time in huge open sheds in the hot, dry climate. Unlike just
about every other wine in the world, sherries do their best when they get some air.

The grapes for sherry might come from many different vineyards of the area. There are light, dry sherries called fino, and dark, richer sherries called oloroso, and lots of variations in between. Blending and aging involve complicated processes that only experts can achieve.

Here in the United States we also make some pretty good sherries, but they are nothing like the wines from the Jerez region. Do yourself a favor and taste a really good one if you haven’t already.

I might call some of the wines we are making sherry, but I really mean sherry-like. Sherry-like wines also have a place in the world, so let’s make some.

The sherry-like taste we get with dried fruit wines comes from the slightly oxidized condition of the fruit, mimicking the long fermentation of the true sherry wine. Not all dried fruits produce this effect, but most of them do. Dried fruit wine keeps for a long time and ages well. I use it for sipping socially and for cooking, particularly in Chinese recipes. Never cook with something you won’t drink!

Here are two raisin wines to start out with. Raisins are hard to chop, but chop you must to release the sugar and flavor. Buy tender ones to start with. I’ve had best success with rinsing and soaking the raisins overnight, then processing them with some of the water in a food processor, or, alternatively, with soaking them overnight and running them through an ordinary meat grinder. If you don’t have either of these machines, soak them all night, drain, then go at your raisins with a heavy cleaver. I use my Chinese cleaver (carefully cleaned to avoid any stray onion or garlic, of course) for small amounts. Be sure to use a very clean chopping board. Use your soaking water in the recipe.

GOLDEN RAISIN WINE

1 gallon of water

2 lbs. ordinary raisins or golden raisins

2 lbs. sugar or 2½ lbs. light or dark honey

1 tsp. acid blend

1 tsp. yeast nutrient

¼ tsp. tannin

1 Campden tablet, crushed (optional)

½ tsp. pectic enzyme

1 packet Flor sherry yeast or Montrachet

Boil the water and sugar or honey together on the stove, and skim, if necessary.

Chop the raisins as suggested above. Be careful to keep them clean. Put them in a nylon straining bag and place them in the bottom of the primary fermenter. Pour the water and sugar or honey hot as possible, over the raisins. (Some recipes suggest boiling the raisins, but I find this gives the wine a Christmas pudding flavor best left to Christmas puddings.)

Cool the mixture to tepid, add the acid, tannin, and yeast nutrient, and the Campden tablet, if you choose. 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.

Check the PA and add the Flor sherry yeast. Stir daily. The fermentation will be vigorous. When the PA gets down to 2 to 3 percent, rack the wine into a glass secondary fermenter. Bung and fit with an air lock.

When you remove the raisins, let the bag drip, but don’t squeeze. Rack the wine again during the next three to six months. When the wine is fermented dry, bottle it. This makes a medium, light-colored sherry-like wine that needs to age at least a year. The color will range from light gold to a medium amber, depending on what kind of raisins you used to make it.

NOTE: If you want to make this wine sweeter, do so on your next batch, or sweeten only half the bottles and compare. Aging this wine will bring some pleasant surprises which are good to learn and depend on your personal taste.

FAT NUDE RAISIN SHERRY WINE

Look Ma, no sugar! Yup, that’s right. This wine takes a lot of raisins! I made this for the first time when I received a lot of leftover
raisins from a group who had been making vast quantities of gorp for a party. Otherwise, this is an investment, but a good one.

I call it Fat Nude because it comes out the color of the skin of an old acquaintance who is tan, plump, and shared with me the joys of a hot tub and a glass of excellent old wine. So this wine is for fat nudes everywhere!

1 gallon of water

6-8 lbs. of raisins, any kind

3 tsps. acid blend

1 tsp. yeast nutrient (mostly for good luck)

no tannin

1 Campden tablet, crushed (optional)

½ tsp. pectic enzyme