Peach wine

Thou shalt not make fruit wines like you would grape wines…

A mastery of the enzymes, enzymatic reactions and proper yeast types could produce fruit wines whose quality and diversity surpasses those of the grape wines. You’ll get several thousand more flavor dimensions than what grapes has to offer!

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sounds absolutly delicious

That is a lot of peaches Joe. I saw your pictures of you making wine. Awesome! I assume that if you use 70 lbs of peaches, you don’t need to add any water?

When you made elderberry wine, where did you get all the elderberries? I have been unable to grow enough to make a wine, but have heard it is one of the better ones.

I only add a little bit of water as a processing aid. The enzymes break down the cell tissues of fruits and I get more yield of juice from the fruits and would use a lot less added sugar in the process. Polysaccharides in the fruits gets broken down to simpler sugars, and in the process, more flavor and aroma is released into the wine, and it would have “overfull” body and wonderful mouthfeel.

As to making elderberry wine, that’s another story. It really lacks the sugars even after enzymatic digestion, and I don’t want to use water, so I would match it with the nearest grape varietal such as Petite Sirah, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon… And in the process, the elderberry makes up 15% of the weight of the batch and would be the dominant flavor in the wine. No added water, except for the enzymatic extraction of the nutraceuticals from the elderberries.

As to the elderberry flowers, enzymes are used to breakdown the petals, but the base is generic white grapes.

Is it common practice in making fruit wine to mix it with a matching type of grape to make up for flavor and or volume? I would have just assumed that, for example, the bottles of spiced apple wine and elderberry wines I bought from a winery contained only apples and elderberries, respectively. Nothing on the label suggests otherwise.

It isn’t a common practice to add matching grape. Adding a matching grape would make the fruit wine very expensive. Sugar is cheaper to add than grapes. In fact in making fruit wines commercially, you are expected to use sugars, it is allowed by the TTB.

In grape wines, you aren’t allowed to add any sugar but you can use grape juice concentrate to boost the sugar content, or you can dilute with water if the brix of your grapes is too high.

In my winemaking style, I use superfruits in my grapewine to serve as the antioxidants to substitute for sulfites, so my specialty wine don’t have detectable amounts of sulfites. Although my wines are 90-95% grapes, I could not label them the grape varietal that I used because of the added superfruits.

Grapes impart some astringency and mouthfeel that cannot be found in some fruits, so I blend them in while boosting the sugar content. My aim is to make various wines from 100% fruits without adding any sugar. The mouthfeel is simply very good, and the combinations are often much better than the best grape wine varietals.

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Very nice thread with lots of information here. I really am just starting to scratch the surface of fruit wines and find them so much better then what I have available off of the shelf, maybe I just don’t care for grape wine. I’m going to be bumping this thread this spring as I start to get some fruit , I hope.

Thoughts on back sweetening? Do you use juice or cane sugar? I like a dry wine but don’t mind a bit of sweet to enhance flavor, I put 1/2 a cup of cane sugar to a gallon of peach wine to back sweeten, seemed about right to me, thoughts? I have a gallon of cranberry that will be ready to bottle soon it is very dry.

Hey, funny you brought this back up. I bottled my peach wine Wednesday night. After four rackings I felt the wine was clear enough. I decided to use grape juice concentrate but could not find white grape juice concentrate so just used the red type. I moved the wine from a carboy to a bottling bucket and added potassium sorbate and campden tablets. I then made 4 bottles of just dry wine. This tasted good and you can taste the peach essence. I then added about one cup of concentrate, stirred well and made 9 bottles of this. I then added another 1/2 cup of concentrate to the remaining wine to make a sweet wine. I think I got 5 bottles of this. I’ll going to let them age in the bottles for a few months.

This is the first time I’ve done this so I have to wait and see how it ends up, but I was happy with the taste tests I had to make while sweetening.

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Peach wine in making this year

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