How to Make Fruit Wine

To make cider or wine, you need a fruit or fruit juice source. Most wine supply stores sell kits that have what you need for this. Or, the other alternative is to use the following method:

Fruit wine from fruit
3 lbs of fruit in a mesh bag
1 gallon of water
2 lbs of sugar or honey

Fruit wine or Cider from Juice
1 gallon juice – can be from concentrate, but fresh is better
1 lb of sugar or 1 ½ lb of honey – leave out if doing cider

Additional ingredients
¼ tsp of acid blend or the juice from 2 lemons if needed
½ tsp Pectic Enzyme recommended
½ tsp potassium metasulfite
1 packet of wine yeast

Heat one quart of water or juice warm enough to dissolve the sugar or honey, then set it aside to cool. Sanitize the jug or primary fermenter with a ¼ tsp potassium metasulfite and water solution per the instructions. If using fruit, put it in a mash bag and mash it up inside the primary fermenter. Add the sugar water/juice solution and enough water or juice to fill one gallon. Test the pH and the acid blend or lemon juice to lower it to the desirable pH between 3.2 and 3.8 and close the container. When the temperature of the batch is no warmer than 75⁰ F, add the pectic enzyme and cover it. Let it sit for 12 hours before adding the potassium metasulfite and covering it once again. Let it sit another 24 hours before adding the yeast and putting on an airlock. The airlock should start to show some activity around 24-48 hours later, but let it be for a week if it does not before tossing it. After about two weeks, rack the batch off of the lees into another bottle. After another two weeks, bottle the batch, and let it sit for about 3 months.

The directions for making cider are about the same, except that fresh apple juice is used and no extra sugar or honey is added. I cannot stress this point enough. Maybe I’ve been hanging around Cider Workshop too much. My husband’s beer making online research stumbled into a page which just happened to have a forum on cider, in which beer makers are rushing the batches and are worried that the ½ cup of sugar they added to a five gallon carboy of cider isn’t enough. It frustrates me, because real cider contains no added sugar, so their half cup is too much.

For more information, please consult The Joy of Home Winemaking by Terry Garey or Cider: Making, Using, Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider by Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols. These books go into much greater detail than I have here.