This question was raised by someone who wants to try making wine from mangosteen. This sounds like an interesting experiment. As you might or might not know, mangosteen is a fruit that grows in Southeast Asia and that has taken the health food world by storm in recent months. The claimed benefits of drinking mangosteen juice are many, including slowing the aging process.
Anyway, this person was concerned that if he started with the actual mangosteen fruit it could be a problem in that it has so many seeds. Can you actually make wine from seedy fruit?
Obviously, if it’s possible to extract drinkable juice from a fruit, regardless of its seediness, then it should be possible to get juice to use for winemaking. For virtually any fruit wine, the fruit is crused in order to extract the juice. If you were just going to drink the juice, then you would strain out the pulp and seeds. But if you were going to make wine, you would probably leave the pulp and seeds in the must to ferment along with the juice. Later on in the winemaking process you would strain it out.
We know people who enjoy making pomegranate wine. Pomegranates have lots of seeds, in fact, the seeds pretty much are the juice. Now, crushing pomegranates is quite a bit of work unless you have a good press to do it with. But it can be done. If pomegranates can be crushed suffociently to produce enough pure juice to make wine, then we’re almost certain that mangosteen can be, too.
