North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["philip sauber" <mrtejas@lycos.com>]

My dad used to make excellent blackberry wine with the rampantly wild 
domestic himalayan vines of the Seattle area that cover ever spot of untilled 
ground.  His recipe called for water.
What you get with water is a style of wine closer to the lighter bodied grape 
fine wines.
Before bottling, we would taste the wine and add sugar to taste.  It amazed me
that too dry of a blackberry wine didn't even taste like blackberries until 
sugar was added
to taste.  To taste with the sugar really wasn't a very sweet wine either.  
Home winemakers have the 
advantage in adding sugar.  Commercial winemakers can't by law.

I have tasted the undilited homemade grape wine in Bosnia/Herzegovina.  I 
noticed the farmer
adding water to his finished wine and sure enough it tasted better to me also 
after adding 
water.
phil

----- Original Message -----
From: mIEKAL aND <dtv@mwt.net>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 10:32:44 -0500
To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Re: Fruit Wines

> Rob:
> 
> Have you made fruit wines?  My real question is about using pure juice 
> to make the wine or adding water to it.  The majority of recipes that 
> I'm finding online call for equal amounts of juice to water.  I'm 
> assuming adding water will increase the amount of sugar needed to be 
> added to get to a specific gravity of 1.090.  (I usually am happy with 
> 1.085...)  Adding water also seems to me that it'll create a lighter 
> body wine.
> 
> 
> On Thursday, July 15, 2004, at 10:01 AM, Rob Halgren wrote:
> 
> >
> 
> >
> > I would, however, go out of my way to get a good quality wine yeast. 
> > Any homebrew store and a number of internet vendors would carry 
> > several  different varieties.  Yeast strains are quite different.  
> > Using bread or beer yeast is a good way to get a product that tastes 
> > 'bready' or 'beery'.  In addition to producing wine that tastes more 
> > like wine, wine yeasts also usually ferment to a higher alcohol 
> > content, which is what you want.  A couple bucks extra for good yeast 
> > is well worth it.
> >
> 
> 
> I've read in numerous places that yeast is the single most important 
> factor in the kind of wine that is created.  I've been using Wyeast 
> liquid yeasts & found that they give outstanding characteristic to the 
> wine made.   http://www.wyeastlab.com/   Since Im not a big fan of 
> country wines & sweet wines, Im looking for something that is on the 
> dry side.  Last years elderberry that I made was remarkably similar to 
> a merlot.
> 
> mIEKAL
> 
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