The latest batch of wine is bubbling away happily in the fermenter bucket. It’s Strawberry this time. My wife de-stemmed and trimmed the gooshy parts off of sixteen pounds of berries, which I then washed and crushed mercilessly. Handy tip if you’re thinking about taking up the merciless crushing of strawberries as a hobby: take it in stages. Small quantities of strawberry can easily be crushed between the bottom of a glass and the inside of a mixing bowl. On the other hand, if you try to crush more than about two or three pounds of berries all at once, they’ll gang up on you and form a viscid mass that will try to trap your crushing implement in a sticky grip.
The recipe is fairly simple:
- 16 lbs strawberries
- 10 lbs sugar
- 4 tsp pectin enzyme
- 5 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1 tsp grape tannin
- 1 package wine yeast
Crush 16 lbs of cleaned and de-stemmed strawberries and place in fermenter with 10 lbs of sugar. Add enough water to bring to 5 gallons – I used boiling water to kill off anything that might have escaped the pruning and washing phase. Stir well and allow to cool overnight. Add the enzyme, nutrient, tannin and yeast, stir again and then sit back and let it ferment.
Sometime next week we’ll be racking it into a carboy to join the others percolating away in the cellar. It’ll be racked off into a new carboy in another three months or so, then bottled when it’s ready.