I was reading an article on fruit wine and it said that you need to drink it young. What is young in this regard and if any of you had made fruit wine was that your experience?
Seems to me that my grandfather made fruit wine and was drinking it for over
10 years out of a huge cask in the basement.
I've drunk apricot wine as much as ten years after making it, and cherry wine six years -- both of which made me wish I'd made much more of it ten and six years previously.
Fruit wine is much better at 1.5 years after starting than it is after 1 year after starting. I suppose it gets even better if you can wait longer but I have read that you should not let it go much more than 3 years or it starts to go bad. I wouldn't know since I've never saved any of my wine for that long.
Wines below a pH of 3.0, may not need SO2 as a preservative for aging. Otherwise, with SO2 a sweet wine can age for decades. Grape wine, and I presume with other fruit, begin with the smell (aroma) and taste of the grape. As the wine ages, the acids and alcohols form esters (bouquet). As the bouquet develops, the aroma diminishes. Wines made with out SO2 tend to lack fruit, and will brown to some extent. I suppose a wine made under argon, in steel or glass, and sterile filtered could be made, but it would be a pain in the butt.
Early wine makers would burn elemental sulfur to make SO2 in an amphora or barrel (SO2 is heavier than air and will rest on the bottom of the container), and then fill the container with wine. The Greeks, and probably the Romans, would then heat their amphora in a smoke house to pasturise the wine before it was buried in the earth for aging.
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