Monthly Archives: June 2007

Cherry Wine Recipe

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I made the case for white wine from cherries a while back, but when I made cherry wine yesterday it was a red. I bought 43 or so pounds of Bing Cherries, and after setting aside 4.5 lb for cherry liqueur, I had about 38 lb left for wine. They’re dark skinned cherries with red flesh, so they wouldn’t do for a white. Here’s how I started my red:

Ingredients:

38 lb (about 17 kg) Bing Cherries
3.5 lb (1.6 kg) sugar
3 quarts (2.8 liters) water
3 tsp pectic enzyme (approximately 7 g)
sulfite to 50 ppm (equivalent to 3 campden tablets)
0.5 tsp tannin (about a gram)
Premier Cuvee yeast

Cherry crush

I destemmed, sorted, and nibbled, by hand. It took a while, but Marsha and I did it together and that made it fun. The result: seven gallons of destemmed cherries ready to crush. An ordinary grape crusher would probably work, though you would need to adjust the rollers to accommodate the cherry pits. I used an older method …

Crushing cherries in a chest cooler with bare feet

Crushing the cherries with my bare feet worked well. I could feel the pits but they didn’t hurt, and I got through all the cherries quickly. Last year, I tried a potato masher. It was too flimsy, so I ended up crushing each cherry between my thumb and forefinger. I don’t recommend it. Anyway, at this point I added sulfite and pectic enzyme. Now I had to add water, sugar, and possibly acid to prepare the crushed cherries for fermentation.

Dilute with water?

Most traditional cherry wine recipes dilute with water. For every gallon of finished wine, you might use four to six pounds of fruit (500 to 750 g/L). That can be tempting on economic grounds alone. Even though I got a good deal on these cherries, an undiluted wine would cost between $5 and $6 per bottle, just in cherries. That’s a great price for commercial wine at retail, but high for homemade wine. In the end I decided that I really wanted to stay as close to conventional red wine as I could, so I did add water, but only a tad more than needed to dissolve the sugar.

Adjusting the sugar

And I did need to add sugar. To know how much, I first had to determine how much was in the cherries. I needed a clear sample of the juice, and that was harder to get than you might think. First I scooped a bunch of crushed cherries+juice through a strainer, and I measured the SG as 1.070. That’s high for cherry juice. What’s happening is that dissolved solids in the juice make it thicker, and that will push the SG higher, so I ran this juice through a coffee filter.

Filtering cherry juice with a funnel and a coffee filterThe filter quickly clogged and when I tried to get it going again, I tore it. I did better the second time. I was patient (didn’t know I had it in me!) and I changed the filter every time it clogged. It still took a long time, over an hour, but I got 0.5 cup (about 120 ml) of filtered juice with an SG of 1.065. I suspect that there’s less sugar than that, but I decided to use that number and target an SG of 1.090. If the sugar was indeed low, my actual SG would be a little less, but anything down to 1.075 would be ok with me. I created a spreadsheet to help me with sugar and acid additions, and after plugging in what I know (SG = 1.065), what I think (estimated liquid volume of the cherry juice of about 2 gallons), and what I’m aiming for (target SG = 1.090), I got back a suggestion to dissolve 3.5 lb of sugar in 3 quarts of water (roughly 1.6 kg sugar and 2.8 liters water).

Pitching the yeast now and adjusting the acid later

The dominant acid in cherries is malic, and Ben Rotter reports that Bing cherry juice often analyzes to 4.7 g/L, as malic. I have a simple acid test kit, but no pH meter. That makes measuring the TA of red juice difficult, so I’ve decided to wait until the wine has fermented out to adjust the acid.

The last step is to pitch the yeast. I had rehydrated it by pouring the yeast packet into 0.25 cups of warm water. After five minutes I added 0.25 cups of cherry juice. I added the tannin and another 0.25 cups cherry juice after it started foaming (about an hour), and I pitched it into the fermenter two hours later. Bottling is still a year or two a way, but I’m excited already!


Update 7/31/07: Sugar and acid

I have since bought a pH meter, and measured the acidity of my cherry wine. It was too high, but so was the pH and that made me reluctant deal with the problem by neutralizing some of the acid. So I’ve decided to balance the acidity by sweetening the wine. I think the high acidity is part of buying cherries at the grocery store; the cherries were just a little under ripe. I’m growing my own cherries, and once my bonsai orchard is producing I’ll have nice ripe fruit that’s not so acidic. In the meantime, I’ll try a different yeast: 71B by Lalvin. It metabolizes malic acid, and that should make it especially suitable for cherry wine.

Update 5/25/2009: Bottled!

Some have told me that it can’t be done, and it is difficult. But you can make a conventional red wine from cherries! It’s an enjoyable red wine and I would recommend it to anyone interested in this approach.

A good deal on cherries and a honey varietal dilemma

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An opportunity needs to be siezed

Safeway is having a sale, cherries for $1.49/lb, and that got me thinking about honey varietals. Let me back up a little. About this time last year, I bought 40 lb of cherries, some from Safeway, and made cherry wine. After I pressed the wine, I made cherry mead in the same way you might make a “second wine.” You make a second wine by adding water, sugar, and acid to the pomace of a wine (so far as I know, nobody calls it the “first wine”). I liked the idea of getting as much use as possible out of the cherries, and decided to use honey instead of sugar. I planned to do the same thing this year, so I’ve been watching for sales on cherries. Now that the sale is on, I realized I was down to my last gallon, give or take, of wildflower honey.

A dilemma needs to be resolved

I didn’t want to use the last of it for the cherry mead (often called “cherry melomel”). Oh, it would make a fine cherry mead, but I thought it would be better for my beer-like mead. Why? It’s dark and even seems a little malty to me, so I think it would be a really good match. The problem is that I’ve got to move fast on the cherries; I’ll probably only get such a good price this week, and a quick check of my schedule says that this Friday would be the best day to buy the cherries and make the wine. Because I’m making a cherry mead from the pomace, I want to press the cherry wine early – three days into fermentation. After all, there’s got to be something left in them for the mead. That means I need another gallon or so of honey on Monday. If I use the wildflower honey that I’ve got, then I’ll either need to use a different honey for the beer-like mead or order another five gallons of the wildflower. There’s nothing wrong with that – I like the honey, but I was hoping to try a different kind. Orange Blossom maybe.

Tomato Wine: Gold Nugget tomato’s first flower

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I noticed the first flower among my gold nugget tomatoes a few days ago, and that marks another milestone on the path toward tomato wine.


A single five pointed yellow flower, the only one of its cluster that is blooming, stands out from the green foliage of this Gold Nugget tomato - 6/21/07


I took this photo on 6/21/07, and since then one or two other flowers have bloomed. These tomatoes are a lot more patient than I am. I’ve done my part. I tended them as seedlings, I transplanted them, and now its up to them. They’ve got flowers to open. They’ve got fruit to ripen! What are they waiting for?

Siegerrebe

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A nearly ripe cluster of Siegerrebe grapes has turned to a vibrant shade of pink-red.

Oz Clarke describes Riesling, in his Grapes and Wines, as the “teacher’s pet” of grapes. “I wonder what it feels like,” he asks, “being the wine experts’ favorite grape, yet failing to excite the palates of the vast majority of wine drinkers across the world?” Well, Siegerrebe doesn’t have that problem; it is most definitely not the wine experts’ favorite grape. Mr Clarke, presumably saying nothing because he has nothing nice to say, doesn’t mention this Gewürztraminer and Madeleine Angevine cross at all. The nicest thing that Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine had this to say about it is, “The variety can usefully bolster some blends in England.” But she doesn’t just damn with faint praise, calling the wine flabby, oppressively flavored, and a chore to drink. Now that’s a lady who speaks her mind!

All this reminds me of a cartoon about a couple discussing a movie. The girl reads off a list of negative reviews – one star, two stars, thumbs down, etc, “It’s a good thing we saw those,” says the guy, “Yeah,” agrees the girl, “we might have seen the movie and liked it by mistake!” I’m glad I didn’t read Ms Robinson’s comments until after I tried the wine myself, because I might have ignored it by mistake. I liked the Whidbey Island Winery’s Siegerrebe enough to grow the grape in my bonsai vineyard. It grows well and ripens early in this climate, that puts it on a pretty short list of grape varietals, and I like the wine. Maybe this is just a case of an obscure grape finding a place where it can shine.

Bottling Day

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I bottled four 1-gallon batches, three meads and an apple wine, yesterday.

2005 Apple Wine

I harvested 13 lb of Liberty apples from my backyard, in 2005, and turned them, along with a gallon of Trader Joe’s Gravestein apple juice, into a batch of apple wine. It’s got a rich golden color, a wonderful aroma, and it’s very smooth with just a hint of apple.

My first mead – with genuine Costco honey!

The meads were each a little different. One of them was part of the first batch of mead I ever made. The fermentation stuck at SG = 1.030, and it was three years old in February 2006. I decided to split the batch, stabilizing and bottling half as a sweet mead, and oaking the other half. It began to ferment again after I racked it onto the oak chips, and by the time I bottled yesterday it was a dry oaked mead that’ll be five years old in February. Even though it was dry (SG = 1.000), it had a lively sweet taste to it, possibly because of the high alcohol content (about 14%, by volume). The aroma was wonderful and powerful.

A mead like Brother Adam used to make

I made the next mead the way Brother Adam made his. He was a monk at Buckfast Abbey, famous for keeping (and breeding) honeybees and making mead. His method was to make it in large batches and age in oak casks for 7 years. He used soft (distilled or rain) water and a mild honey, like clover. He aimed for a lower alcohol content than most – about 8 or 9% ABV – and shunned most additives, though he often used cream of tartar and, for dry meads, “a little” citric acid. He boiled the honey-water mixture for 1-2 minutes and fermented cool (65F – 70F) with a pure yeast culture like Madeira or Malaga.

I didn’t have an oak cask handy (or the honey to fill it, or the space to store it, or …), and I have seen the inside of a rain barrel. So I used tap water and fermented in a plastic pail. I decided that 0.5 tsp = “a little” citric acid for a 1-gallon batch, and I added 1 tsp of cream of tartar. 2 lb of clover honey brought the SG to 1.074, which at about 10% potential alcohol, was slightly higher than the 8-9% I was aiming for. I boiled the honey-water mixture for about a minute and fermented cool with Côte des Blances yeast (I had never heard of Madeira or Malaga). So far, it has aged for a little over 3 years, including 9 months on oak chips. I don’t think I’ll be able to wait seven years!

I thought I could smell, not taste, the oak in this one. It was smooth and I enjoyed it.

A wine-like mead

The last batch of mead was the most wine-like of the lot, and the only one I didn’t oak. I started this one in March 2004 with clover honey from The Honey Store. I added tannin and tartaric acid to make a dry mead with 12% alcohol. The aroma was distinct from the other two; I would say “fresher” and I thought there was a hint of sweetness in the taste.

So now I’ve got twenty bottles of four different wines and meads to enjoy. Time to stop writing and start sipping!

White Wine From Tomatoes!

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Different for a reason: Why I’ll make it white

When most people think about tomato wine, they – ok, most people don’t think about tomato wine, but if they did they would – think about red wine. It’s the same way with cherry wine, and just as I wrote about white cherry wine a few days ago, I’m going to make the case for white tomato wine today.

Since I’ve neither made nor tasted tomato wine before, I’m a little concerned about the taste. If there are objectionable flavors, then I think they’re most likely to come from the skin and pulp. A white wine is just fermented juice, so that would avoid the flavor compounds, good or bad, in the skins. As for the pulp, I’d want to stay away from sauce tomatoes, like Romas. In the end, I chose to make a clean dry white from Gold Nugget tomatoes. Gold Nugget is a cherry tomato with yellow/orange skin and yellow flesh that’s a reliable producer in this climate.

How to make it: Good fruit, balanced acid, and the right amount of alcohol

I have ten vines in the ground, and I don’t know how big a harvest to expect. I’ll pick each tomato when it’s ripe and put the day’s harvest right into the freezer. It won’t come in all at once, though, so I’ll store the fruit until the harvest is complete. That’s not the only thing about tomatoes that’s different from grapes. Tomatoes are about 95% water, by weight, compared to 80% for grapes.

The dominant acid in tomatoes is citric, rather than tartaric. I haven’t been able to find information on the acidity of tomato juice, but if the TA is low, then I’ll have to add acid to the must. In that case, I can choose one, or a combination, of the three major organic acids found in most fruit: citric, malic, and tartaric. Winemakers always use tartaric acid for any additions to conventional grape wine, but there are two schools of thought for acid additions to non-grape wine. The first approach is to use the dominant acid in the fruit. In the case of tomato wine, that would be citric. Another idea is to use a complementary acid. That is, instead of the dominant acid, add one of the other two. So I could use either malic or tartaric with this method. Should I need to acidify, I’ll probably use tartaric. I think it’ll make the a wine a little more familiar by giving it a bit of conventional white wine character. Also, I understand that citric acid can make the wine more vulnerable to vinegar spoilage and that malic can be harsher than the other two.

There will be a lot less sugar in the tomato juice, than in grape juice. I understand 5-8 degrees brix is common, so I’ll be adding sugar. It’s pretty straightforward to find out how much sugar to add for a given amount of alcohol. The question is, how much alcohol should I target? I often aim for 12% alcohol, by volume, in my wines and meads. That would be about 22 brix and a specific gravity of 1.090. Some research, by the late Dr Kime of Cornell, suggests that fruit wine (I’ve never liked that term – grapes aren’t fruit?) is better below 10.5% alcohol. There isn’t a whole lot of research into non-grape wine, so when a little bit come along, I pay attention. I’m leaning towards 10% alcohol for my tomato wine (18-19 brix, SG = 1.075). I’ve still got some blanks to fill in, but I’m getting a pretty good “big picture” idea of how I’ll make my white tomato wine.

Thinking about the next step

If this is a success, then I can continue investigating tomato wine. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I can see a red tomato wine next year. Red wine is all about the skins, and smaller fruit has more skin, pound for pound, than larger fruit. That’s why wine grapes are a lot smaller than the table grapes in the grocery store. So I would need cherry or grape tomatoes, for red wine, with deep dark color. I wonder if there are any dark colored small tomatoes that do well in this climate? I don’t know, but if my white tomato wine is a winner, then I’ve got plenty more to think about!

Update 12/22/2007: I finally did it!

The acidity of tomato juice is low, and I added tartaric acid just as I planned. I changed my mind about targeting a low alcohol level, and decided that my first tomato wine should be a more “normal” 12% alcohol. You can read all the details here.

Montmorency Cherry

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When selecting my cherry trees, I was thinking in terms of making red and white wine from sweet and tart cherries. I need clear juice to make white cherry wine and red/black skins to make red cherry wine. That means at least four different cherry trees: two tart and two sweet, and at least one of each has to have clear juice. Montmorency is the tart cherry with clear juice, making it an amorelle type. Since it has red skin, I’ll be able to make red wine as well. That means I could have managed with just three trees and skipped the tart cherry with red juice. I don’t know of any dark skinned sweet cherries with clear juice, so I still needed two sweet cherry trees.

Rhubarb Wine: Another dissapointing harvest

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A Small Harvest

I pulled in just under 9 oz (250 g) of rhubarb today, which is about the same as this time last year (9 oz on 6/2206). My running total of just under 19 oz (525 g) is significantly behind last year’s 30 oz (850 g). Since I was hoping/expecting a bigger harvest this year than last, it’s pretty disappointing. And it’s my own fault. I wrote here about how I neglected the rhubarb patch early in the year. Well, I got the weeds under control and started fertilizing, but I ran out of my homebrew organic fertilizer. I didn’t get around to making more for a while, and other things came up, and – Ok, I was lazy and I got a small harvest so far. Today I fertilized the rest of the patch, and I expect a more normal harvest over the rest of the summer.

A Delayed Experiment

Last year, my July and August harvests totaled two pounds, so if I do as well this year I’ll still have over three pounds at the end of the summer. That’s enough to make a 1-gallon batch of rhubarb wine, but I had plans for two batches so that I could experiment. Normally I make the wine without doing anything to neutralize the oxalic acid in the rhubarb. In fact, I think of it as an important part of rhubarb wine’s character. Others add precipitated chalk to do away with the oxalic acid, then add other organic acids like tartaric, citric, and/or malic. They claim that oxalic acid contributes an objectionable flavor, and I wanted to test that by making to nearly identical batches – one made like all my other batches, and one treated with chalk and tartaric acid. Just to be clear, the only issue is how the oxalic acid affects the wine’s flavor. While it can be toxic in high doses, most of it is in the rhubarb leaves, which you should never use in any food or beverage. The stalks contain much less and are safe to eat (or ferment). Anyway, the experiment will have to wait until next year. I’ll just have to make do with a batch of great wine, this year 🙂

White Wine From Cherries?

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Isn’t cherry wine is supposed to be red?

I mentioned white cherry wine in passing here, but most people think of cherry wine as a red. The only commercial cherry wine I’ve tried is a red – crushed, fermented on the skins, then pressed. Every recipe I’ve seen involves either fermenting on the skins or fermenting red juice. When I first made cherry wine, last year, I wanted to make it like a conventional grape wine rather than a “country wine” (4-6 lb of fruit per gallon, with added water, sugar, and acid). I made a red cherry wine. In fact, it never occurred to me that I might make a white.

So why a white cherry wine?

There’s a story about white Zinfandel, and how difficult it was to get it accepted. Reviewers reviewed harshly and judges judged skeptically because everyone knew than Zinfandel was supposed to be red. Eventually this new white was judged on it merits and has become a popular wine. Now, I’m not sure if this story is actually true (anyone out there know?), and I don’t even drink white Zin, but why not a white cherry?

How do you make white cherry wine?

Two of the cherry trees I grow, Montmorency and White Gold, will produce fruit with clear juice. I was looking for that specifically, because I wanted to make white wine from them. The idea is to keep the process as close as possible to a conventional white wine from grapes. Crush and press the fruit, adjust the sugar and acidity of the juice, then pitch the yeast. I’m open to diluting with water if the acidity is too high, but I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. I’m also willing to be flexible about what “too high” is. If the acid profile looks like Riesling, I may just treat it like one rather than “correct” it to more normal levels. If I get enough fruit from each tree, I’d like to ferment them separately. That way I can see how each tastes on its own, then try different blends. Plenty of ideas, not enough cherries!