Strawberry Wine

While I have not made that kit, I have made strawberry wine from scratch - sometimes when a wine is very young, that's all you do taste is the alcoholic kick and that yeasty taste. It does improve by racking the wine off sediment, and letting the wine bulk age (7 months) and bottle age (a few months). Give it a chance. Darlene

Unless you have previously experimented by altering the directions on the can, then you can not expect to get the desired results. Brown sugar and molassas sound like pretty drastic changes to the directions. I recommend that you first follow the direcitons, sample the results after some aging and THEN on the next batch if you want to experiment, you will have a baseline upon which to judge.

I agree with Paul, I use brown sugar sometimes but only rarely. It can overpower other tastes and my understanding is that molasses is even stronger.

All may not be lost though. Is your wine dry? Most country wines do not taste like the fruit they are made from if they are dry. You may need to sweeten it up a bit to get the fruit character to come back. But let it age a bit first. Also, if you do sweeten it, be sure to use the proper amount of sorbate and sulfite to stabilize it.

Ray

Yes, the wine is dry. I'll take your advice and let it age a few months and then try to sweeten it a bit.

If nothing else, my winemaking hobby is forcing me to learn just a little bit more patience.

Thanks to everybody for the help and advice.

Chris.

People say fishing teaches patience. In my experience, it just weeds out the impatient. I think wine making is the same. Impatient people switch to beer or just buy what they want.

Ray

I'm not familiar with the recipe for the vintners harvest kits, they come with six pounds of fruit right? How large of a batch did you make with this, I use at least 6 pounds of strawberries per gallon, used 36 pounds of strawberries for my last batch of 5 gallons.

Jeff

Yes. This was 6 pounds, and I made up a 3 gallon batch. The fruit was canned, so perhaps most of the flavor was already extracted from it.

Thirty-six pounds sounds like a lot of fruit, and I assume that you are using fresh fruit instead of canned.

Also, just curious how much sugar you use and what the wine turns out tasting like. Dry? Sweet? I'm picturing something akin to alcholic strawberry jam.

Chris.

That is 2 pds of berries per gal. For any berry I would say 3 pds were the minimum for a light wine but to taste the fruit I usually use 5 pds which is about the same as Jeff's suggestion. That is for canned, frozen, or fresh. I use enough sugar to bring SG up to about 1.090.

Ray

I used 10lbs of sugar for the 5 gallons, like to get the ABV to about

10.5%. Fermented dry, much better flavor sweetened a bit before bottling, nice strawberry aroma & subtle flavor, good color, not at all alcoholic strawberry jam-like!

Using 2lbs/gal of any fruit will give very little, if any, flavor or aroma. Besides, you could of probably bought 10-15lbs of frozen strawberries at a grocery store for the cost of the vintners harvest and got a better result.

Jeff