Wine not? A great way to enjoy your produce

[Kassaundra]

This thread is going to be for all of us the post our experiments w/ wine making. Almost any fruit or veggie can be turned into wine to enjoy while perusing the seed catalogs and dreaming of warmer times.

Some winemakers are very experienced and have all the cool gadgets and gizmos and some of us (me included) are more of "redneck" wine makers, making do w/ what we have and trying new and different ideas. I would like all of us to feel comfortable sharing our techniques, recipes, equipment, and results. And for no one to be made to feel uncomfortable for any po-dunk methods or equipment.

I just have been making cherry wine, I will share how and what I did, but don't have time right this minute.

 

[Kassaundra]

@baymule is this what you had in mind?

 

[baymule]

@baymule is this what you had in mind?

Yeah! Now we can share what we do, and how we do it!

 

[Jared77]

This is a cool thread thank you for starting it

 

[Kassaundra]

Okay my cherry wine. I have several very productive small tart cherry trees and this year I decided to try my hand at wine making w/ them. You have to understand my cooking techniques are very free flowing, I seldom measure anything so many of my ways of telling will involve measurements like, a little, some, glop, enough, til it feels right, handful etc......

I pitted the cherries and squished them as I did, into a colander and collected as much juice as I could w/ it in the fridge overnight, then I took the pulp added water to cover the pulp and cooked on stove (like tea) didn't boil, but let it steep then strained it in the colander again, I took that juice which ended up being roughly 2/3 of a gallon of juice, then I made 1/3 of a gallon of tea, using 3 bags of hebal tea, a black cherry, wild berry, and vanilla nut. Added sugar (I think about 2ish cups???)

I put all the juice in a cleaned milk jug and put on Camden tablet in, and wine nutrient (can use 25 raisins instead feeds the yeast) shook well and let stand 24 hours. Then I added yeast shook well and put a balloon w/ a pin hole in it over the open end of the milk bottle. Waited for the bubbles to stop and balloon to deflate then poured carefully into wine bottles leaving the sediment at the bottom.

I filtered that through a paper towel and put in a mason jar for immediate drinking, and am ever so not patiently waiting for the real stuff to age enough b/c every level of this has been deeeeelish (tasted the prewine and the sludge at the bottom)

Even if you don't have a cherry tree, you could duplicate w/ cherry juice and teas of your choice.


Camden kills the microbe so the only thing growing will be your introduced yeast. But it will kill the good yeast too so if you use it you have to wait 24 - 48 hours to add the yeast.

 

[baymule]

thanks for sharing!

 

[Kassaundra]

Look what I found at Wally world for $7.50

It holds 2.5 gal, is stackable, has the big screw top and the spicket is screwed in /out too. I was thinking you could set it tall take off the spicket and screw on a waterlock or place a balloon for fermenting then replace the spicket and set flat for clearing, bottling.

 

[Nyboy]

Love cherries, was all set to make cherry wine. Read how you do it, seemed like a lot of work. Will still buy my wine LOL.

 

[Kassaundra]

All 4 gallons of the cherry wine are now bottled and aging. Now on to the green tomato wine. I am going to try making it in my new Wally world find. I am picking and choosing from several recipes. This one I won't have any idea how it's actually going to taste for some time (probably over 6 months)

 

[baymule]

Great score! I can see there is a lot more to this wine making than the simple dandelion wine I made....... What's a Camden tablet and what does it do?