Fruitastic Magic - Recipe

So have you made a country wine on the pulp?
Are you looking at all that pulp and thinking "what a waste"?

Yeah that bugs me too, and so I really enjoy making wines with a 2nd run on the pulp. This is one I did with the pulp from the 5 gallon brew called Berrylitious. 2nd run wines are great fun to make. It feels great for so many reasons; it's so easy and it's as cheap as chips because all the fruit was probably heading for the bin/compost bin. It'll still end up there, but via a 2nd run everyone is happy.

Ingredients for 5 gallons:

• Pulp from Berrylitious
• 5 Litres Red Grape Juice (Sungrown)
• 245g Can of Grape Concentrate (Young's definitive white wine enricher)
• 3 Kg sugar
• 2 Teaspoons Tartaric Acid
• 2 Teaspoons Citric Acid
• Yeast Nutrient (2tspn Nutrivin, Brupak)
• 20 g Oak Chips (Young's; French Oak)

Method

Keep the pulp from your "parent" brew in the fermenting bin. Cover it up tightly and as soon as possible use it as follows.
Pour on the grape juice and grape concentrate. Add a couple of gallons of cold water. Dissolve the sugar in about a gallon of hot boiled water, and then add it to the fermenting bin. Dissolve the acids and nutrient in cold water and add them to the fermenting bin too. Finally add the oak chips and make the volume up to around 5 gallons. Give it a good stir and cover tightly.

Discussion

Some of you may be asking ... "where's the yeast?". Good question. The answer is that there is plenty of yeast mixed in with the fruit pulp. So when you add your other ingredients it'll fire up in a flash without needing a new yeast addition.

My gravity came out as 1064, which is pretty low and will make a wine of about only 9.5% ABV if the volume of liquid is actually 5 gallons. Of course the volume of liquid will probably turn out to be around 4 - 4.5 gallons and so, on topping up to 5 gallons, the resulting wine will be around 8% ABV if I use water to top up. I'm aiming for 10.5 - 11.5% so at the stage when i transfer the must to secondary fermentation (under airlock) I'll make up the volume to 5 gallons with a sugar solution.

A useful figure for trying to get your ABV where you want it .... Adding 18g of sugar per litre of wine will add about 1% ABV. Of course I'll also want to increase the volume so it may take some fiddling about to get it precisely where desired. Usually I can't be bothered with such precision. If I get the gravity to a point where I reckon my wine will be anywhere in the range 10.5 - 11.5% ABV then I'll be happy to leave the fiddling about there!

Those of you who come here often will probably think this looks like a quickie wine, and that's what I'm aiming for. I want to be drinking this in the spring ideally, tho the addition of oak chips may not help in that regard.

Update 12th June 2012;

What can I say, wow, this is a real hit, fruity, easy drinking. I've been drinking it for about a month already and it's definitely ready. Guess I got a bit lucky with the oak chips, but I didn't overdo them so it's not too much of a surprise. Given that it's a second run wine I'd urge you to try doing this, it's very economical and if buying frozen fruit stretches your budget then a second run will rectify that.