Sunday, June 17, 2012

How to make Fruit Wines and Brandies:


Wine bottles from Germany
Photo by Justinc


Making fruit wines or brandies is using a whole series of fresh and dried fruits you can use.  Among them are any fruit that belongs to the raspberry family that is classified as a “drupe.”  Any other member of the family that is classified as a drupe including apricots, peaches, plums as well as most members of the grape family.  This doesn’t take into consideration any of the tropical fruits but the author feels there are some that would lend themselves to the task.

To make wine from any of these fruits, and remember that you can combine these fruits in different combinations to make wine to your particular taste.  You can make either dry or sweet wines.  It just depends on the ingredients.  Sweet wine requires a bit more fruit then dry wine.  Wines can vary from sweet to dry depending on how much sugar is added to the mix before the wine is fermented.  The more sugar, the sweeter the wine will be.

A generic wine can be made from the following ingredients:

Fruit                                         Yeast
Water                                       Sodium Bisulfate
Sugar                                       Wine Tannin
Campden tablets                       Acid Mix at least 60% Tartaric Acid
Yeast nutrient

This is a generic dry wine, to make a sweet dessert wine leave out the last three ingredients.  Just add more fruit and sugar.  Winemaking is more of an art then anything else, and it is something you can experiment with before you finally come upon a formula that you like.  There has been more ink spilled over the subject of wine making then there is water in all the world’s oceans.  Google: Wine Making and Wine Recipes. 

Brandy presents a different set of making problems and also the chance to experiment further with something that is probably a bigger art then wine making.  All of the name brandies are the result of such experimentation by usually monks who originally brewed fruit of herb brandies as medicinal concoctions.  This includes virtually all of the brandy like drinks in the world.

The brandies are neutral grain spirits in which the fruit is steep in for several weeks.  There is usually also sugar added to suit your taste.  After the brandy has steeped it is then bottled and allowed to age,  The bottled brandy is then aged in the bottles in a cool dry place for at least a year.  Some fruit brandy has actually been lying about ageing for one or two centuries.  It seems that the older it gets, the better it gets.

Like wine making you can also Google Brandy Making and Brandy Recipes.

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