FOOD Making your own wine

Fine time for your very own fruit wine

Organic Living

Hans Wieland

Making your own wine is probably one of the most satisfying ways of preserving the produce of your garden and the surrounding hedgerows. With a bit of patience it is easy to achieve and can become a highly economical pastime. Buying wine in Ireland is still pretty expensive compared to buying wine on the continent, but many home winemakers swear by the quality of their home produced ‘country wines’.  A country wine is any wine not made from grapes, be it fruit, flowers, vegetables or grain.

Popular fruit wines are made from apples, gooseberries, plums, elderberries and sloe. Elderberry for example makes an excellent wine when blended with apple, sloe, damsons or even banana. All wines require a good balance of acids for fermentation, tannin to clarify and give zest, organic flavouring in the form of fruit or flower, nitrogen, sugar and yeast.

Basic requirements

All wines have four essential ingredients: yeast, sugar, flavour and water. Sometimes it is necessary to ad enzymes to aid the clearing of the wine from excessive pectin, starch or protein.

Yeast is the most important ingredient. It is a living organism and is responsible for the fermentation process. There are many specialist wine yeasts available. Put the yeast in a sugary solution and it begins to multiply vigorously, turning roughly half of the sugar into alcohol and the rest to carbon dioxide. Plain white sugar is actually better than brown and more natural sugars, because the latter add an unwanted and distracting flavour to the wine. Organic people have to compromise here!

Fermentation

The fermentation takes place in two stages: First the aerobic stage (with air), when sugar and yeast are added to ‘must’ or the pulp of the basic ingredient (fruits, vegetables, grains) in a plastic bucket and covered with a muslin. This fermentation needs about ten days at a temperature of around 21ºC (good room temperature).

The second stage takes place without air; the anaerobic stage. This needs a lower temperature of about 16ºC. At this stage you need a bit of special equipment like a demijohn or fermentation jar and an airlock.

Many of the ingredients for country wines are deficient in yeast foods, so it might be wise to purchase yeast nutrients according to the recipe.

It is important to maintain a steady temperature throughout fermentation. A slow, quiet second fermentation usually makes a better wine than a fast and vigorous one.

During the second fermentation, the airlock cuts off air supply to the yeast and allows carbon dioxide out, preventing the invasion of other bacteria, which would spoil the wine and turns it into vinegar. Fermentation continues until all sugars have been digested by the yeast bacteria.

The alcohol level has then reached around 15 per cent, which prevents any more yeast activity. Before you can bottle and store you must siphon off the wine from the deposited solids. This process is called racking and can be repeated two months later. After some five months, the clear wine can be bottled.

Apple Wine

Ingredients

• 2.75 kg of apples (I used windfalls)
• 1 kg of sugar
• 1 lemon
• 150 mls of white concentrate
• 1 teaspoon of citric acid, yeast and yeast nutrient
• 4.5 litres of water

Method

Wash and cut the apples, skins, brown patches and all. Simmer for 10-15 minutes in 4.5 litres of water. Strain liquid on to the sugar and the thinly peeled rind of a lemon. Stir well.

When lukewarm, add the juice of the lemon, the yeast and the yeast nutrient to the liquid and the concentrate. Cover and leave for 24 hours in a warm place, then pour into a fermenting jar and insert air lock. Leave in a warm, dry place to ferment for four weeks. Siphon off into a clean dry storage jar and ferment out under air lock.

Then siphon off and mature for six month before bottling.

Hans Wieland is joint manager of The Organic Centre, Rossinver, Co Leitrim, which offers courses, training and information in organic growing, and runs an Eco Shop and an online gardening store. For more information, visit www.theorganiccentre.ie, e-mail [email protected] or phone 071 9854338.Questions or comments? Contact Hans at [email protected].