North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Robert Capshew <rcapshew@insightbb.com>]

Never had trouble making raspberry wine from frozen

berries.  Just put the berries in a nylon bag, add ~2#

sugar per gallon, water, yeast and usual wine chemicals.

 

Cranberry wine is difficult to ferment due to the oxalic acid

which inhibits the yeast.  You should make a yeast starter from

apple or orange juice with wine yeast then add cranberries

slowly until the yeast is tolerant of the cranberries before adding

to the whole batch.  Would not recommend grinding the

cranberries.

 

I would skip the apple juice for both wines.  Perhaps that is

contributing off smells. 

----- Original Message -----
From: Richard MURPHY <murphman108@msn.com>
Date: Saturday, December 4, 2010 14:28
Subject: [NAFEX] fruit wine dilemma
To: nafex <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>

>
> 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
>
>
>