North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Gordon Nofs" <gc_nofs@hotmail.com>]

Phil

In adding sugar to a wine that is finished before it gets to 11% you take the chance of either just a little will make bubbly, and more will blow the bottles, corks hopefully. If it has not reached 11% which is the point at which the yeast dies. It will start to work. If you do not have a vinometer to check for alcohol, that is the problem.

Gordon C. Nofs

Flint, MI.

 

 

 

From: "philip sauber" <mrtejas@lycos.com>
Reply-To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Re: Fruit Wines
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 11:40:31 -0600

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 undiluted 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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