Making Wine - Anyone Interested ?

[seehuusen]

Thanks very much Tim

So if my wife made up the required sugar enriched water, added frozen fruits, stirred that together and added Lallemand Lalvin EC-1118 yeast and put the lot into my fermentation fridge at say 20C, I'd be on the right track?
After fermentation finished, add bentonite and crash chilled for a week or so. Then do I bottle it at that stage, or do I need to siphon off and do multiple filter/Crash Chill processes?

Thanks in advance,
Martin

 

[Airgead]

You can bottle straight away and bottle age but I find that country wine benefits from some bulk aging. Rack it into a clean glass vessel and age in bulk (with or without oak chips) for a few months. Then bottle.

Should be no need to filter. The bulk aging should cause it do drop very clear.

 

[TimT]

I generally don't even bother with temperature control when I do a wine or a mead. There's a lot of simple sugar in them and they have a high fermentability. I find at my place, indoors, temps don't go above 20 degrees often. The only thing to remember is, because a wine is generally much higher in gravity than beer, it will take longer to ferment; and the yeast will additionally benefit from some time to clear things up. My method isn't really as fine tuned as Airgead's! But anyway, as I think I said before, age is the key. In a few months to a year your wine may go from having a nasty rocket-fuel taste (methyls and phenols and fusels and all that weird shit) to having a beautiful character, as good as or better than anything you can buy in the shops. There should be plenty of country wine recipes online, my friend - have at it!

 

[Airgead]

My method is really simple. I use it for all meads, melomel and country wines.

Make up your sugar solution (sugar for a country wine, honey for a mead) to the correct OG. Add yeast and nutrient and ferment till nearly done. I don't bother with temp control. Add the fruit and allow fermentation to finish. I find that adding fruit after the initial intense primary fermentation keeps more of the fruit charater. I may be deluding myself though.

Leave the wine on the fruit for 1-2 weeks. Any more than this and I find that you tend to get rotten fruit flavours coming through as the pulp floats on top and oxidises/attracts mould etc. Rack into a clean vessel and bulk age (I tend to add a few oak dominoes at this point). I'll usually bulk age for 3-6 months until the level of oak is right and the wine starts to mellow out. It should also be brilliantly clear.

Bottle and age some more.

Drink when it's nice. I usually bottle a few 375ml bottles to act as samplers. Try one Avery month or so till its good then drink the rest.

I bulk age for a few reasons... First, I tend to do a lot of meads and mead throws a lot of sediment for some reason. I prefer to get that out in the bulk aging vessel and leave it behind the when bottling rather than have it happen in the bottle which can spoil the presentation. The second reason is that it takes less space to bulk age in a carboy than in bottles.

Cheers
Dave

 

[wynnum1]

If high temperature summer weather would be better to cool down .

 

[seehuusen]

Thanks very much for this information and methods, this should get us started with the first few batches.
Regarding OG, I just plotted that into Beersmith, and found for a 10L batch, I'd need about 2Kg for a 12.5% wine. Obviously the fruit will add a bit extra sugar, so I'll account for that.
I think I'll still be fermenting in a fridge, because of the 30+ QLD weather

Super keen to try out grapes at a later stage too, seems like some good wine could be made!

Cheers,
Martin

 

[seehuusen]

One more question please, for a country wine, whats the rule of thumb on how much fruit to add?
10% of volume? E.g. 1kg for 10L.

Cheers,
Martin

 

[TimT]

It really depends on the fruit you use. Remember what you're doing is piling a fruit on top of a heap of table sugar; in beer terms you're just adding an adjunct to an adjunct, so the old rules about '10% of adjunct' really don't apply.

What fruit are you going to use? Google around for the name - say, 'plum country wine' or 'plum wine' or whatever - and you should be able to come up with some usable recipes.

Here's an extremely simple windowsill wine - ( you ferment it on a warm spot like the windowsill!) - that might give you ideas. (And the thread I started about it).

 

[Airgead]

My rule of thumb is around 1kg of fruit per 5l batch size. If I'm doing something new I'll start there and adjust from there.

 

[wynnum1]

Plant some mulberry trees they make a good wine problem is the wildlife getting them first and there is also those who have silkworms who need the leaves.

 

[seehuusen]

Thanks again, I'll start off with the 1kg/5l rule of thumb, that was actually the number i had in my head.

Wife wants to do 2 wines, one plumb and the other raspberry/apple

 

[Airgead]

Raspberry is lovely. Never had much success with plum though. I find it goes quite bitter and nasty. Whether it's the type of plum I am using I'm not sure. You want to use the sweetest plum possible.

I also find that for some reason plum wine oxidises like a *******. The only wins I have ever had a problem with have been plum.

 

[TimT]

I made a plum mead that seemed to come out alright, partly because I think the plum acted as nutrient for the yeast - in addition to some ginger that I added during the boil. The mead matured relatively quickly and was very pleasant.

Recently I had a Japanese plum wine that was very pleasant. I don't know about the details of fermentation but one thing I noticed is that it had a distinctive nutty smell, very similar to the smell in Amaretto (almond liqueur) and some cherry pip noyeaux that was given to me by a friend. I believe the way to get this smell is to age the wine over the pips for several months. But I don't know enough about the process with plums and if you wanted to do this you should research the subject first and find out which plums may be used, whether the stones should be broken up and how many to use - as there may be a risk of adding undesirable elements to your brew if you add too much. ( Plums, cherries, and almonds all contain trace small amounts of poison, a type of cyanide I believe).

 

[Airgead]

Yeah, I've had plum wines and meads that are great. I just can't seem to make one myself. I'll keep trying though.

The almond flavor is indeed cyanide. Cyanide tastes like almonds. In fact it's more proper to say that almonds taste of cyanide. Unless you are using bitter almonds, you would need an awful lot of fruit pips to get a dangerous dose. We use apricot pips in jam. Likewise cherry pips.

 

[TimT]

Yeah - I was looking into using almonds in a mead recently to get that smell; the amounts of almond used are piddling. I think to make 'almond essence' you add 12 almonds to a pint of spirits. No-one ever died from eating 12 almonds. So it's probably similar with plum and cherry pips.

 

[Airgead]

Yeah. It's a really strong favour (mostly because we evolved to detect time amounts to avoid dying). I made a peach ratafia once - it's a 1700s thing. Basically peach leaves soaked in wine with sugar. Drunk as a liqueur. About half a dozen peach leaves in a couple of litres of wine and this intense almond smell and flavour emerged. It was really interesting just how intense it was.

Practically undrinkable to a modern palette though.