Ever thought about trying your hand at making fruit wine? You should if wine making is a passion of yours. Fruits that make many of the best fruit wines are elderberries, plums, peaches, blackberries, huckleberries, blackcurrants, and pomegranates. Other fruits include berries, plums, apples, apricot, bananas, cherries, pineapple guava, and blueberries. You will find just about any fruit can be tried. Many other fruit wine can be made from flowers like hibiscus, elderberry, and dandelions. You might also try Vegetables such as potatoes, rhubarb, rice and parsnip.

A favorite of mine is a wine called Apfelwein in Germany made from apples. For the best taste experience use your fruit within a year as they do not age well at all. Creating and drinking right away will be the best.

One of the most fun aspects of making your own wine is large list of things you can make it from. If you have limited access to fruit you always have the choice of using a fruit base, a concentrate of the fruit you wish to try, from one of the many companies that sell wine making supplies.

A popular combination to try is a fruit wine combined with a grape wine. This makes for an unusual taste, especially for the sweet tooth’s out there. Go for a Chardonnay or Zinfandel to create a marvelous fruity grape wine.

This taste should fire your palate. I always take into consideration exactly how sweet these fruit wines should be. In fruit wine the natural sweetness should be enough. However if it is not you can use sugar or wine conditioner, a very good liquid sweetening agent designed for use in making wine. There are plenty of great wine making juice flavors that can be added to your fruity wine that will work fine.  Making your chosen wine dry or sweet exactly to your taste.

Aging and bottling is the final stage in your fruit wine making process. Do this step to your own preference. You can bottle your wine immediately,  age it in ceramic or stainless steel tanks, or put right in bottles to age. With a few basic steps, you will be well on your way to perfecting your system of creating a flavorful and desirable Fruit Wine for you and all your friends and family to enjoy. Learn More Here!

From time to time we get requests not only to explain the secrets of grape wine–including how to make it–but also about how to use other types of fruits to make wine. Almost any kind of fruit can be fermented to make wine. Whether you will like it or not depends usually on whether or not you enjoy the fruit from which it is made.

For example, I have never learned to like watermelon. I grew up in the South and watermelon was a required part of every picnic or outdoor event during the summer there. But for some reason I just never took to it. Therefore I am pretty sure I would not like watermelon wine. If you’re a watermelon lover then you would probably enjoy wine made from watermelons, and that’s fine; more power to you!

Peaches are a different matter altogether. There’s nothing like a sweet, juicy peach–the kind that gets your face sticky just from biting into it. When made well, peach wine can capture much of the wonder and delight of eating a raw peach. Plus of course you have the warmth and kick from the alcohol content.

If you have a big bunch of ripe peaches–and you do need a bunch, at least two pounds–you can try your hand at making peach wine according to the following recipe. Please note that some of the ingredients and equipment are most easily found at a store that specializes in home winemaking items. If you don’t have such a store, you might need to order from the Internet. Also, this recipe assumes knowledge of wine making terminology such as “racking” and “fining.”   Please search this site or the Internet, or acquire a basic winemaking book, if you need help understanding these terms.

Ingredients

Peaches, 2 or 3 pounds
Granulated sugar, 5 pounds
Yeast nutrients, 1 teaspoon
Pectic enzyme, 1 teaspoon
Tannin, 1/2 teaspoon
Campden, 1 tablet
Water, 12 cups - boiling!
Wine yeast, 1 package

Remove the pits from the peaches. Chop the fruit up in small chunks. Place in your primary fermenter. Add water, sugar and the campden tablet. Stir to dissolve the sugar, and let sit overnight.

The following day, add nutrients, pectic enzyme and tannin. Check the specific gravity — it should be in the range of 1.090 to 1.095.  Stir in the wine yeast.

Stir the mix daily for three days.  Then, strain the fruit pulp, squeezing out as much juice as you can.  Siphon into your secondary fermenter and attach an airlock.

If you want your peach wine to be on the dry side, rack it in three weeks, and then every three months for a year.  After you year you may then bottle the wine.

For a sweet wine–and isn’t this really how a peach wine should be?–rack at three weeks as above, but add a half a cup of sugar dissolved in a cup of the wine of your choice. Stir gently, then plae back into the secondary fermenter.  Repeat the process every six weeks until the addition of sugar fails to restart fermentation. Rack every three months until the wine is one year old, then bottle.

If the wine is not clear, or still has quite a bit of sediment the formed between rackings, you may fine the wine as follows.

Use wine finings or plain gelatin. Gelatin: use 1 teaspoon per 6 gallons of wine. Finings: 1/2 teaspoon per 5 gallons, or as instructed on package. Soak in 1/2 cup cold water for 1/2 hour. Bring to a boil to dissolve. Cool. Stir into the wine. Let sit 10 to 14 days. Rack. If not clear enough yet, repeat process. Do not increase the amount of gelatin or finings. Bottle once the wine is clear.

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.