A Beautiful Homemade Strawberry Wine
Previously, we solved our pectinase problem by skinning papaya, now lets look into the prospect of brewing beautiful wines with stuff you can get easily from a humble village market or you probably already have at home.
Spice It Up
Before we dig in let me confess: I am not a big fan of most spiced wines. The reason being, spices can easily dominate delicate flavour bouquet of your wine. The trick is to add subtle character to the wine while staying strictly in the background like a shadow. Also you shouldn't spice each and every wine you make - it's just a bad habit.
Depending on your culinary taste, you can throw in spices in combinations or single additions. Make sure to add these ingredients prior to Campden treatment, so that any wild microbes present in them are killed before adding wine yeast. Also locking them in a hop bag or tying them in a clean hankie with weights (try glass marbles) will eliminate the chance of floaters in your finished wine.
Spices to Consider: Black Pepper, Cardamom, Coriander seeds, Cinnamon, Cloves, Fennel, Ginger (after boiling for at least 5 minutes), Saffron, Kokum, Nutmeg, Dried Chilies, Paprika.
Herbs to Consider: Sage, Rosemary, Beer Hops (added towards the end of fermentation), Basil, Thyme, Dill, Lemongrass, Ashoka tree roots (Indian Sassafras), Liquorice, Arjuna tree bark, Miswak branches/fruits etc.
In the next episode in the series, I am planning to suggest spice combinations from my experiment book..
Do Not Jaggery
Many Indian home winemakers have a perceived/passed on/dogmatic tradition of using jaggery in wine (also in hooch and sometimes beer). While I can understand it probably stems from the practice of using Blackstrap molasses to make rum; jaggery is no molasses and wine is no rum.
Depending from state to state, recipes of jaggery preparations also vary and so do additives including oils, chemicals, salts and artificial colours. Most of them are wine killers.
In my experiments jaggery imparts nothing but mud - Astringent flavour, never settling gunk and the delicate fruit character is lost. Same is the case with unrefined palm sugar, I personally don't recommend either of them. You are better off using un-bleached(yellowish) sugar if you must save money and add a lot of fuel to your wine.
Melon-a-Go
Some of the fruits mentioned further in this series have very little meat on them and bigger stones. You can not expect to get 10 liters of must by crushing 20kg or sometimes even 40kg of such fruits. Many home wine makers address this issue by adding water and sugar to increase the wine must. This works ok in making alcohol but resulting wine has a thin body, sharp bite, pale colour and stripped off flavours. Using too much sugar also results in high amount of fusel alcohols and bad hangovers.
Here comes probably the best tip on making country wines. My secret workhorse - Watermelon. Melons are inexpensive, have a vibrant colour, high sugar content and loads of juice/water. Instead of using water and a ton of table sugar, you can use melon juice and some honey to adjust original gravity. Both will contribute positively to taste, body and colour of your wine. If you feel broke, chuck honey and use melons and plain glucose, still you will save a lot of taste and colour. Do add some lime juice though, if you want to retain the crimson colour of watermelon post fermentation.
Bright red Melon juice, Lemons & some fresh Basil to flavour it
Melons also have a very timid flavour and won't over power the flavour of other fruits in most cases. If you want a darker colour and more "bite" you can also throw in some black grapes or black raisins. Of course you should be considerate when using melons with wines made from paler fruits such as Pineapple, Banana, Mango, or even apples, since melons can change their character/colour somewhat.
"Yeast" Nutrient
The cell eat cell world of microbes
Grapes naturally contain balanced nutrition to allow yeast to thrive. Other fruits may not contain enough nutrition and you may require to add Yeast nutrient AKA food grade Diammonium Phosphate (DAP) to make wine from them.
On the other end, yeasts are cannibalistic and readily feed upon dead and sometimes live yeast cells too! So, the trick here is to boil inexpensive bakery yeast in some water for 5 minutes, just to kill it. Cool it and add that soup to the must. How much yeast? 1 gram per liter of wine you plan to make. Curiously, according to studies, yeasts grow much better on "yeast soup" than DAP.
Citrus Repetitious
Yeast prefer a slightly acidic environment to thrive. Also a pH under 5 makes it difficult for bad microbes to grow and ruin your wine. Certain fruits naturally contain acids but for others you may require to add them separately.
My favorite method for adding acidity is by adding lemon juice or orange juice. Affordable, easy and available everywhere. Ideally the wine must should have a pH between 3.4 to 3.9 but to make it simple keep adding the lime/orange juice until you start tasting slight tartness in the must..
Citrus fruits come in many shapes, sizes and colours
Ascorbic acid present in these fruits will help retain colour of your wine by stopping oxidization of the fruit tannins.
Citric acid present in them doesn't convert to lactic acid unlike Mallic acid does (the phenomenon is called "malolactic fermentation"), which makes a wine taste slightly milky - a desired character in Grape wines but not in country wines. The slight tangy after taste also goes well with the country wine style.
Freeze 'em Berries
Not really an additive but rather an important tip. Try to deep-freeze your fruits at least overnight if possible. Along with using pectinase, Freezing breaks fruits' cellular structure without harming aroma and taste. It's always easier to juice fruits post freezing.
Apparently with certain fruits this step in not necessary such as, Pomegranate, Watermelon and obviously Grapes.
Berries are notoriously hard to juice if not frozen beforehand
"Ripe Fruit" is the only way!
One more important tip: Only buy ripe fruits and use them in 24 hours. For that you may want to plan your brew day in advance.
When buying fruits in bulk people often make a mistake of choosing semi-ripe fruits in a hope that the fruits will ripen themselves by the time they utilize them for making wine. Unfortunately many fruits won't. This results either in fruits going stale, or contributing less sugars, colours and flavours to wine must.
Excess acidity in unripe fruits also becomes a headache for winemakers. You may add some Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) to the must to tame down some of the acidity but with excessively sour fruits you may end up adding too much Carbonates and resulting wine will taste chalky/minerally. Also it is impossible to remove acidity from a finished wine without destroying it.
Remember, It's always easier to add acidity to your wine then removing it.
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