Has anyone else tried making a 🥕 carrot wine?

[Tanglefoot]

I made some carrot wine about a year ago.

It doesn't taste of carrot!

Only the slightest hint of the aftertaste you get when you eat a bite of raw carrot.
And I think it's turned out great.
It tastes complex, very fruity.
I often taste lots of citrus flavours. Lemons, grapefuit. zest. And gooseberries! I love gooseberries and I definitely didn't put any in fermenter lol.

It is so surprising that it doesn't taste strongly of carrot. Only a slight aftertaste at the tail end of all the other flavours.
When it was only a couple of months old it, it tasted strongly of carrot and alcohol. It's amazing the difference a year made to it.

And It's cheap to make. At a cost of $20 I have made a 12 bottle batch for next winter.

Can anyone tell I'm excited by how the wine turned out lol

 

[terminal2k]

that sounds really interesting, can you elaborate on the process you used?

 

[Tanglefoot]

Hello.
I originally got the recipe from the River Cottage Booze Handbook.

I'll put the original text below, with the minor changes I made.

Another great thing about this recipe is it comes with free food.
In my case 8 litres of delicious carrot soup : )


Root Vegetable Wine recipe.

2kg parsnips or carrots.

1.1kg sugar

1 tsp pectic enzyme

½ tsp amylase *¹

Pared zest and juice of 2 lemons

400gr Sultana's. Oil removed and chopped *²

1/2 tsp grape tannin

1 tsp yeast nutrient

1 ripe banana (for parsnip wine and optional!)

5g champagne yeast


Scrub your chosen root vegetable to remove all dirt, leaving the skin on, then cut into slices about 5mm thick. Place in a large pan and add 2.5 litres water. Bring to the boil and simmer gently until soft, but absolutely not until they are falling apart the wine will never clear if your roots are mushy).


Strain the liquid into a clean fermenting bucket. Stir in the sugar until dissolved and add 2 litres cold water. Cover and allow to cool, then add the pectic enzyme and amylase (to break down any starch) and leave for 24 hours.

Aerate the must, then stir in the lemon zest and juice, add chopped sultanas, grape tannin and yeast nutrient, and slice in the banana, if using.

At this point because I was using unsterilised sultanas so I added 1 crushed campden tablet to kill anything undesirable in the Must.
Then I waited 24hrs then continued.

Check the specific gravity and adjust if necessary.

Aerate the must, then pitch the yeast. Cover and leave to ferment for 4 days, stirring every day except the last.

Once again because of the sutanas I did something different here.
I sieved the Must into a bucket.

Then...

Siphon into a demi-john and fit an air lock.

Rack off into a second demi-john when fermentation appears to have ceased and leave until the wine is clear. Bottle if you want a dry wine or sterilise and sweeten to taste as described on pp.94-5. Allow to mature for a year before drinking.

My notes

*¹ amylase is added to prevent the chance of starch haze. I had trouble finding the amylase used in the UK and at an affordable price here in New Zealand, so I decided not to use it, unless I ended up with said starch haze.
There was no haze in the wine I made

*² the original recipe used 250ml white grape juice concentrate. Which is unavailable in New Zealand.
So I found a recommended replacement quantity of sultanas.

TO REMOVE the coating of oil on most dried sultanas: - soak in hot water for 10 minutes.
- then place in
sieve and rinse with hot water for several minutes.