Brewing - Favorite Home Brew Wine Recipies?

[fnord]

please post your wine recipies here.

Grandmas per gallon recipe
1 yeast packet
1 gal Dh20
1 pound of sugar
1 tube of juice mix concentrate
whatever is around for herbs that might go well this batch was 1/5 lb guarrana and 1/4 lb calamus for 6 gallons of wine

wait 4 weeks and enjoy!this wasent planned but four weeks just happens to be the day that grandma starts school!

[nEone]

3-4 pounds of VERY ripe nectarines
1 gallon of water
1.5 pounds white sugar
.5 pound brown sugar
1 pack of chardonnay or sweet mead yeast
1 tsp of yeast nutrient
1 cup of black tea or 1/4 teaspoon of tannin

De-seed fruit, remove any bruised spots, crush in a large pot with a potato masher or with hands. Add sugars and tannin/tea. Add enough water to cover. Bring to high-simmer - hold for 20 mins.

Cool covered in fridge until room temp. Pour into primary bucket (fruit mush and all). Add yeast (per the instructions on the packet) and nutrients.

Mix well (get lots of air in). Set aside with an airlock. Mix in air every day for three days.

Leave to ferment for 1 week, rack to secondary bottle, rack in month-intervals until clear and fermentation has completely stopped (usually three months) - bottle and wait until the 6 month mark to taste. improves considerably at the one year mark.

Makes a sweet dessert wine as akin to a white-port as SWIM has ever had.

**SWIM keeps a half-dozen 1 Gallon cider jugs empty and ready (for whatever reason, cider jugs are actually more like 1.25G, which allows a perfect amount of headroom for secondary fermentation). Every month, SWIM goes to the market and picks up 3-5 pounds of what ever is in season and ripe - and starts a batch with that. The glass jugs are great, but they need to be covered (SWIM uses a t-shirt) - light does bad things to low-alcohol brews - that's why beer in green bottles goes skunky faster than beer in brown ones.

[FrankenChrist]

I made mine with a strong white wine yiest, chardonnay I think, and finished it with a champagne yiest (probably overkill). It contained different kinds of honey, ginger, lemon and orange juice, dry lemon and orange rind cloves, mint, black tea for tannin and licorice (the herb in its natural form of sticks). All I could taste was sweet with a bitter aftertaste.

The strength and taste reminded me of something between wine and portwine. Surprisingly, the herb tastes did not come through as much as I had expected.

[nEone]

Unless your fermentation got stuck, there's not really any reason to add yeast more than once...it won't hurt, but it certainly will make for a drier wine as champagne yeast has a much higher alcohol tolerance than chardonnay, and would thus eat the residual sugars that the chardonnay left behind. You also risk bottle explosions by adding champagne yeast at the end of the process.

I recently experimented with a beetroot wine - the color is phenomenal - hot pink - I haven't tasted it yet, but plan on sampling it for New Years eve.

[FrankenChrist]

Thanks, I'll remember that for next time. Maybe this is also why my wine got that bitter aftertaste.

[nEone]

The bitterness is probably a combination of the licorice root and the tannins in the tea, made more pronounced by the fact that any residual sugars were likely consumed by the champagne yeast. Give the rest of the bottles 6 months to mellow a bit and you may find the wine is more palatable.

Herbs and roots can be tricky; 3 or 4 cardamom seeds are enough for 3 Gallons of spiced mead - any more and the whole thing takes on an unpleasant astringency. Often, it's easier to use the essential oils or extracts to achieve the results you're looking for.