Fruit Wine

North Star sour cherries make an absolutely stunning wine. Especially if you let a couple gallons of it bulk-age for a year or two with a cinnamon stick at the bottom of the carboy.

I've also had spectacular results from apricots, and slightly overripe Bartlett pears.

I'll let you know in a few months how last year's batch of serviceberry wine turned out. :-)

If you will go where I told you, you will have all the answers you need. It does require registration.

I tried getting in there but for some reason it wouldn't accept my registration.

Do you have a recipe for blueberry wine? Seems to me that stuff would be essentially a very good wine since the fruit is very grape-like.

Look, I have Window's XP with all the latest updates in it - that means that it doesn't work for crap anymore. The original issue worked pretty good. But this one doesn't allow me to get around on Jack Keller's site very well - it will stick here or there or simply not show that you can move to another page.

We don't have probablems like that with "news." stuff.

Now THIS is the sort of stuff I'm looking for.

Grapes have been known to work quite well.

Do you suppose you could do a better job than the commercial high end vintners on grape wine?

I'm pretty sure that I could do a better job than them on fruit wines though.

Better? As well anyway, I have Gold Medals from the Sacramento Fair for commercial wines. I made home made wines in '78, '79, '80 while I was working for a winery in Sonoma County, since then I've worked in wineries in the tasting room, cellar, and lab, and I had my own lable from '81 to '90, when we went to Europe for a year. When we returned I continued working for wineries. Presently, I'm working seasonally in a winery lab, and spending the rest of my time gardening.

I don't mean to be condescending, but fruit wines are usually sweet. Sweetness covers flaws. Not that sweet wines are flawed, but cheap table wines usually have some sweetness just for that reason.

You might check your local library for wine making books like

101 recipes for making wild wines at home : a step-by-step guide to using herbs, fruits, and flowers / by John N. Peragine, Jr.

or

The Winemaker's answer book : solutions to every problem, answers to every question / Alison Crowe.

Basically, you can make a wine with 21 - 24 brix solution, a pH of 3.6, yeast food (can be a handful of raisons), and flavoring of choice.

Plainly YOU are a professional. I assumed that most people on the group were amatuer winemakers. Amatuers would probably have a problem matching your skill levels.

While you are entirely correct, I'm sure, that doesn't mean that you CAN'T make an excellent fruit wine.

I have those books already.

It's nice having someone in the group who knows more than he thinks he does.

Wow - thanks.

22-25 lbs of cranberries. I rinse them and check through the berries. I steam juice the berries in a stainless steel steam juicer in batches for 1-1.5 hours each batch and collect the concentrated juice and add chlorine-free boiling water to reconstitute to 5 gallons, in a 10 gallon bucket. While the mixture is hot, I add cane sugar to the juice - 1 pound per each percent of alcohol I want. 13 pounds = 13% alcohol. Stir I use Lalvin RC 212 yeast. I ferment for 7 - 14 days. Then I add a teaspoon of Young Living Orange Essential Oil (oil-gold.com) to the clean, sanitized, empty glass 5-gal carboy and transfer (rack) the cranberry wine into the carboy. It is important that the Orange essential oil goes in at this stage. If earlier than 7 days it will prevent good fermentation. If after the transfer, it ill not incorporate the flavor into the wine as effectively. Do the secondary fermentation for 4 - 6 months in a 65 - 75 degree temp area. When finished fermenting, bottle, wait 6-12 months and enjoy. Anine

FWIW all of my white fruit wines have been pretty lousy apart from 3. A canned pear wine I made that was very passable after 2 years, canned strawberry and canned raspberry wine which are delicious. The flavours have either been slightly off, or just not nice particularly. In contrast, I haven't made a bad dark fruit wine yet (apart from prune and a coffee mead which doesn't count!

All of the below aged 2 years before I drank much of them - although the grape wine was amazingly good after 3 weeks fermentation and a weeks fining...

The grape wine from my father in laws vine (14 years old in the Midlands, UK) Now makes 3 gallons of staggeringly good rich and well bodied wine. Oaked it is as good as anything I have ever drunk.

Blueberry wine can be insanely good too, as it blackcurrant wine.

Several of my cherry wines - from black cherry thru morello have been very good and tasty using enough fruit and watching acidity.

Blackberry wine is great too with enough ripe fruit in the recipe.

My elderberry blackberry is my best and I make several gallons at a time of that now. I am sitting on 250 bottles of it which I plan to bottle age another 3 - 5 years at least. It is already more than 2.5 years old and getting better all the time.

Jim