Aug 23 2009
Best Home Winemaking Recipes
Cherry Zin – No Zin Grapes but a GREAT Taste!
By Mike Carraway
When we bottled it, it didn’t taste very good – I have to be honest. I thought it was just another failure.
WRONG! 7 months in the bottle makes a HUGE difference.
So, without further adeaux….
Here is my recipe for what I call “Cherry ZIN” (you WILL NOT find this anywhere else):
This recipe is for 5 Gallons
5 cans Blackberrys(from the store)
5 cans Cherrys(pitted – from store)
5 Cans Blueberrys (from the store)
13 cans Frozen Grape Concentrate
1 box Sunmaid Raisans
2 tablespoons black peppercorns
1 tablespoon pectin enzyme
6 ounces med. toast oak chips
1 teaspoon yeast nutrient
Process raisans, blackberries, cherries, blueberries in food processor.
Put in a large pot and add the peppercorns, yeast nutrient, pectic enzyme, and wood chips.
Add 2 cups water. Bring to a low boil and then turn off stove. Let the mixture cool to 85 degrees.
Strain the mixture into your primary fermenter.
Add your 13 cans of grape juice concentrate. Add 1 gallon of warm water.
Check SG. Add Sugar water to bring SG to 1.1. Top off with water/sugar-water. Stir vigorously. Add 4 crushed/powdered Campden tablets and let sit overnight.
Pitch your yeast and continue from here as usual.
Once you bottle this stuff (in about a month and a half), leave it in the bottle for at least 7 or 8 months.
It tastes like crap until then – I KNOW.
This wine has a wonderful aroma. It has a multilayered flavor that you will absolutely love.
My wife said it was the best homemade stuff EVER. See what your spouse or significant other says.
APRICOT, RASPBERRY AND ELDERBERRY ROSÉ WINE
3/4 lb. chopped dried apricots
6 oz. raspberries
3 oz. dried elderberries
1-1/4 lb. granulated sugar
1/2 pt. white grape concentrate
1 cup mixed red and yellow rose petals
1 tsp. pectic enzyme
1 gallon water
crushed Campden tablets
Burdundy wine yeast and nutrient
Before you start, dissolve sugar in 6 pts. warm water, then chill the water overnight in refrigerator. Chop or mince dried apricots and elderberries, crush raspberries, and mix together in primary fermentation vessel with chilled sugar-water, nutrient, pectic enzyme, and two crushed Campden tablets. Stir well, cover and set aside 24 hours. Add activated Burgundy yeast, cover and ferment on pulp three days, stirring daily. Strain pulp in fine nylon sieve and press lightly to extract juice without pulp particles. Add grape concentrate, cover and ferment additional four days. Add rose petals and ferment additional three days before straining and add sufficient water to bring volume to 1 gallon. When S.G. drops to 1.000 or lower, add another crushed Campden tablet and rack, without splashing, to secondary fermentation vessel as soon as fermentation restarts or a heavy deposit of yeast forms, whichever is sooner. Fit airlock and store bottle in cool place (65-70 degrees F.) without disturbing for three months. However, check after two weeks and, if pulp debris is detected in sediment, carefully rack again without splashing and add another crushed Campden tablet. After total three months in secondary fermentation vessel, rack again, being careful to avoid splashing, add one crushed Campden tablet, and top up with water before refitting airlock. After additional three months, rack again as before, add another crushed Campden tablet, top up with water, and bottle. May taste after six months but matures at 18 months. [Adapted from Bryan Acton and Peter Duncan's Making Wines Like Those You Buy]
Making Sweet Wines
from
www.eckraus.com/
Making your wines sweet is a deceptively simple and straight forward
process. But, because there always seems to be a few questionable
recipes or ideas flying around for making a sweet wine, I decided to go
over some of the basics. Hopefully this will clear up some of the confusion
and misconceptions surrounding this process.
- Basic Process
The first thing that needs to be understood is that any sugar you add at
the beginning of a fermentation should have nothing to do with how sweet
your wine will turn out. This sugar is added simply for the wine yeast to
turn into alcohol.
The “Potential Alcohol Scale” that is on almost all wine making hydrometers
is used to verify that the correct amount of sugar is being added to obtain
the alcohol percentage you desire. If the fermentation goes as planned,
the wine will be dry (without sugar) or close to dry when done fermenting,
but more importantly, at the specific alcohol level you intended.
Sweetening can then be added to the wine to taste. A stabilizer such as
Potassium Sorbate should also be added at this time to inhibit any re-
fermenting that the new sugars may unintentionally feed. By adding your
beginning sugar in this way and then sweetening later on, you gain
complete control over both the wine’s sweetness and its final alcohol level.
Now granted, if you add more sugar to the fermentation than the wine
yeast can handle, the remaining sugars will contribute toward the wine’s
sweetness. This would be alright except that quite often the wine ends up
too sweet for most peoples taste with no way of correcting it. Secondly, if
a stabilizer is not added to wines prepared in this way, they may decide to
ferment again, sometimes even several months after being bottle. This
can be an equation for a big mess.
The highest level of alcohol I would ever depend on obtaining from the
initial sugars added to a fermentation is 13%, and that’s assuming you
have a healthy, vigorous fermentation. Shooting for alcohol levels that are
beyond this is possible, but always in question.
So as you might start to see, piling on the sugar at the beginning of
fermentation, in reality, gives you little control over how sweet the wine is
actually going to be.
- What To Sweeten With?
This first thing that needs to be pointed out is that anytime you add sugar
to a wine for sweetening and the fermentation is complete, it is of great
importance that you add a wine stabilizer such as “Potassium Sorbate” at
the same time. Otherwise, the newly added sugars can potentially make
the wine re-ferment causing it to become dry tasting all over again.
Sweetening your wine with regular store-bought cane sugar is perfectly
okay and is what most people use. But, I though I would mention some
other ideas that have been used successfully by some other home wine-
makers and myself.
- Corn Sugar in not quite as sweet as cane sugar you buy from the store,
but seems to give the wine a more crisp, cleaner flavor. This would be a
good choice for most white wines or more generally, wines with a lighter,
more delicate flavor.
- Rice Syrup has even a cleaner flavor than Corn Sugar. It imparts a
character that can almost be described as minty. This would be a great
choice for Sauvignon Blanc or maybe even an apple wine.
- Honey can also be a be used to sweeten your wine. For example, use
raspberry honey to sweeten a raspberry wine. Very effective.
- We also offer a Wine Conditioner that makes sweetening your wine very
simple. It is a heavy syrup with stabilizer already incorporated into it. You
just add to taste.
- Juice concentrates quite often are appropriate as a sweetener and will
also enhance the wine’s flavor. Also, consideration should be given to the
fact that the wine’s acid level will be increased by the natural acids in the
concentrate.
- Fresh Fruit Juices can be used in the same way as concentrate. Grape,
apple, pear all work very well. Fresh fruit juice is quite often the best
choice when sweetening harsher wines such as elderberry.
- Artificial Sweeteners need to be mention here as a precaution. Sweet-
eners such as Equal and Sweet ‘N Low do not bond well on their own with
liquids. Pop manufacturers use binders to keep these artificial sweet-
eners suspended. If added to a wine that has been stored these types of
sweeteners will need to be stirred up off the bottom before serving.
By all means experiment. If you have a 5 gallon batch, take off a
measured quart and add a measured amount of sweetener of your
choice to it. I you like the results, multiply your efforts to the rest of the
batch. If not, pour it back in with the rest and start all over.
