North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[david liezen <chandos49@hotmail.com>]

Richard,
 
I brew beer, but my father used to brew excellent cranberry wine. He used fresh cranberries, sugar and water in a canner kettle - no apple juice involved - and usually bottled it just before it finished fermenting. (I recommend finishing it out until you know what timeframe and temps work in your situation, quite the risk of burst bottles otherwise.) It yielded a slightly fizzy sweet/tart ruby wine that nicely complimented Thanksgiving turkey a year later.
Since you already know more about wine making than I, you can probably determine how much sugar to add (dextrose seems to me worth using, as it is more easily fermented than sucrose and I use it all the time for bottling beer/ale.)
Worth a try. Have fun,
 
 Dave Liezen
BTW, I can't ask him just what he did: deceased 8 yrs.
 

---

From: murphman108@msn.com
To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2010 19:27:56 +0000
Subject: [NAFEX] fruit wine dilemma

Hello All;
 
I've been making fruit wine for about 5 years now. Most of my recipes use apple cider as a base fruit juice, and other fruits added later to create different flavors. I have an unusual, repeatable failure mode I would like to share with you all.
        Raspberries OR Cranberries just don't work! There is always some odd aroma even after 6 months of aging. What's really strange is that if you opened a bottle of each, blindfolded, you might not be able to tell them apart, based on smell. None of the other fruits I've used cause this aroma. It's almost like plastic or glue smell; not sulfur.  (apples, raisins, ginger, prunes, grapefruit, orange peel, elderberry, aronia, blueberries, blackberries all do well for me!) Furthermore, I've repeated the recipes a couple of times, varying the fruit/cider ratio, but that gave similar results.
 
Does anyone know what these 2 fruits have in common? Is it citric acid? I'm at a loss.
 
       (For the enologists in the crowd; typical must: S.G. = 1.085  pH = 3.4 avg  So2 = 25ppm)
 
It would be awesome to be able to use cranberries and raspberries for wine, but for now I'm stuck.
Maybe a bottle of wine or 2 for the correct solution?
 
Thank you
 
Murph




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