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.

Racking - a piccie

I know, I'm bad, I have neglected my blog and even when I've been good I haven't put in enough piccies. So here is a piccie of racking in progress. This is the Ginger & Lemon Grass quickie wine being racked from the 5 gallon barrel into 5 single gallon demi-johns.

Berrylitious - Recipe

Some months ago me and the better half went down our street (which is a quiet cul-de-sac with little traffic) and grabbed about 3kg of elderberries. The were stripped from their sprays, washed, bagged, and then frozen.

I hoped that I would do another blackberry forage and make my usual Blackberry and Elderberry wine, but alas I missed out on the blackberries.

So what to do? Straight elderberry wine takes an age (like 3 years +) to become a delight. I have nothing against laying down a bottle or two for some years, but gallons??? Not my style. It therefore had to be a mixed fruit wine. So that meant visiting some freezers for some bargains. And we found some. This recipe is a first for me, it's a mix of many berries, currants and cherries too. I have no idea what it'll be like but I expect a red with lots of body and fruitiness.

Ingredients (for 5 gallons):

• 3 kg frozen, foraged Elderberries
• 3 kg frozen sweet dark cherries (sainsbury's)
• 3 kg frozen mixed summer fruits (sainsbury's)

....comprising equal quantities of blackberries, raspberries, black currants & red currants.

• 4 kg Sugar
• 5 Teaspoons Pectolase
• 3 Campden tablets (crushed)
• 1 Teaspoon Tartaric acid
• 3 Teaspoons Citric acid
• Yeast Nutrient (nutrivin, Brupak)
• Sauternes yeast (Ritchies)

Method

The fruits, still frozen, were tipped into a 5 gallon fermenting bin. Yes it is a heap!

Sugar was dissolved in a gallon or so of boiled and still hot water. This was tipped over the fruit. Then the volume made up to around 4 gallons with cold water. The acids, campden and enzyme were dissolved in water and then added to the fermenting bucket also. It was all given a serious lengthy stir and then left, tightly covered, for a couple of days. Mashing the fruit was not a concern to me as the freezing and thawing should have served the same purpose.

When I came back to it I made the volume up to fill the bucket and stirred well. The gravity measured 1092. That's quite high, but as the volume of solids was significant I wasn't worried. I added the yeast nutrient and yeast and covered. Each day the must was stirred sloshily to get some air into solution. After about a week the must was transferred to a barrel to ferment under an airlock.

The volume of liquid I got at this stage was around 20 litres, somewhat short of the 23 litres that more or less makes a gallon. If I made this up to 5 gallons with the addition of water alone then the true gravity of the original must would have been 1081. Assuming this ferments out to a gravity of around 995, which is normal for sauternes yeast in my experience, then the wine would be close to 12% ABV. This is fine for me, so that's what I did. It's now sitting under an airlock and measures about 5 gallons.

(Hold your horses if you make this wine, all that pulp is still useful. The next post will tell you what to do with it if you want to make a Rosé).

In about a week I'll transfer this to 5 single gallon demi-johns because I'll need the 5 gallon barrel for something else. when it stops fermenting then I'll rack, degas and stabilise. It'll probably need something like 6-12 months before it'll even be worth trying, but hopefully next winter there'll be plenty of big-bodied fruity red wine to drink.

Update 12th June 2012;

Well this must be the biggest surprise I've had for some time when it comes to brewing wine. I said that I hoped it would be good to drink in the winter, but here we are in summer and it is ready, and it is delicious too. Very fruity, nice body, nice feel, the cherries stand out form the background, but not so much that it tastes like cherry wine. My intuition tells me that the elderberries were crucial, and so I'm pretty staggered that it's ready so soon. Not complaining tho I may be missing a red wine when winter comes around cos the chances of this lasting til then are slim!

So fellow brewers, if you have a lousy blackberry season (or just miss it) and if waiting years for a straight elderberry wine isn't your cup of tea, then grab yourself some frozen berries to go with your elderberries and you'll be laughing.

Update on Apple & Grape Juice quickie

So, some time has passed since I had the first sample of the apple & grape juice quickie wine. Then it was complex and not a pleasure. Now it has rounded and is ok in terms of quality, but it is probably going to be one that has the marmite factor. There is a taste of corn about it, not overpowering but definitely there. The flavour of apples lingers long as an aftertaste. The colour is something else, delicate straw/pink, and its clarity is ok too.

Would I do it again, yes. It was great fun doing the picking, pulping, pressing etc. But I need to investigate the strange corn taste. So far my googling hasn't yielded anything very useful, the most likely contender being Dimethyl Sulphide, but it only fits this in one regard so i'm not sure that I've nailed it. The good news is that the wine is young, so time may come to the rescue.