11 easy recipes for making cherry wine step by step at home
Homemade winemaking is gaining popularity every year as an original hobby and a way to deal with excess harvests. The fruits of various fruit trees and berries harvested from their own garden are used as wine material. It's not difficult to make cherry wine at home, consider simple recipes for an alcoholic drink made from fresh berries, compote, juice and pulp.
The subtleties of making wine from cherries
The exquisite aroma of cherry wine and delicate tart taste will impress even true gourmets. Hand-made cherry wine is a true masterpiece of homemade winemaking. The peculiarity of the drink and the basis of winemakers' disputes is whether to use seeds with seeds as raw materials or remove them first.
There is no consensus on this issue, someone believes that fusel oils contained in cherry pits are released into the drink and are harmful to health. Proponents of wine on cherries with pits believe that there is no danger to health if the pits remain intact and do not split, moreover, such wine turns out to be more tart and original in taste.
How to choose the right raw material?
There are various recipes for making cherry wine. The recipe for making the drink mainly depends on the selected cherry raw materials. Wine drinks are infused with fresh cherries, cherry compote, juice or pulp.
Fans of stronger drinks add vodka or cognac to the finished wine.
To create different shades of taste, white currants, raspberries, gooseberries are mixed into cherry liqueurs.
How to make cherry wine at home?
To make wine at home, you will need glass bottles, silicone tubes about a meter long, 1.5 centimeters in diameter. Each winemaker adds sugar to the wash to taste, the amount of sweetener depends on the sugar content of the feedstock.
Homemade cherry wine is infused on the basis of natural fermentation, which lasts about three months. The wine must be filtered three times; if a press filter is available, the number of cleanings can be reduced.
Classic recipe
The traditional recipe for making cherry wine is to create a drink based on fresh berries. The seeds are removed at will, whole berries are crushed with a mortar or hands.
The resulting mixture must be diluted with water in a 1: 1 ratio. If the goal is to make dry wine, no sugar is added, it is enough to add yeast or raisin sourdough instead.
In the classic recipe, yeast does not need to be added, therefore, before mashing the berries into the mash, they are not washed. For 4-5 days, the wine ferments, covered with a lid or dense cloth, in a warm place.
After 5 days, it is necessary to remove the cake by filtering the contents through cheesecloth; it is recommended to do all procedures with gloves. Sugar must be added to the resulting wort, but this must be done correctly. Part of the cherry wort is poured into a saucepan, where the sweetener is poured, put on the stove and heated to room temperature, often stirring the sugar until completely dissolved.
Important! Boil the wort and heat it over 30 With it is impossible, yeast and beneficial bacteria will die, the fermentation process will not begin.
The sweet wort is poured into the main bottle, then the remaining wort is poured there and the water seal is tightly closed. The stage of "quiet" fermentation begins, the container with the wort must be removed to a dark, warm place.
After 12 days add to the "still" wort a portion of sugar in the same amount as for the first time, you can dissolve the sweetener in young wine. Leave the drink to ferment for another 25-30 days. After this time, the wine must be filtered from the sediment. Usually this procedure is carried out using a hose or a press filter. Leave the wine for another week, the wine drink will begin to lighten. Young cherry wine is ready, if a person wants to get an aged drink, the wine is left to ferment for another 3 months, and the drink is filtered when the precipitate falls.
A simple recipe without yeast and vodka
Cherry wine is created on the basis of a natural fermentation process, so there is no need to stimulate the process with yeast, as well as to fix the finished drink with vodka or cognac.
An important nuance of a simple recipe without yeast and vodka is the use of unwashed berries in the mash, which retain their natural bacterial background. A simple recipe without yeast and vodka is based on the step-by-step classic recipe for making cherry wine, presented above.
Option without water
In the classic recipe, cherry pulp must be cooked and diluted with water in a 1: 1 ratio, but there is an option for making cherry wine without water. In this case, the taste of the wine is tart, and the color is darker.
It is not necessary to dissolve the sugar beforehand, it is laid in layers between the cherry pulp, so the mixture is left to ferment for a month, then the water seal is opened, the contents are mixed, the fermentation process is activated with renewed vigor. As soon as there are noticeably fewer carbon dioxide bubbles, the pulp is separated through cheesecloth. The purified wine continues to ferment, when a precipitate falls out, the drink is filtered and continued to stand.
From cherry compote
A rational way to process unused cherry compote. For 3 liters of compote, use 1 handful of raisins. All components are mixed with sugar, mixed thoroughly and poured into a bottle under a water seal.
The fermentation system of the drink is the same as in the classic recipe: the wort is separated, the fermentation process is activated, the drink is filtered (several times if desired), and kept. After three months, the drink is poured into bottles, for storage they must be placed in a cellar.
From cherry juice
Cherry juice is a concentrated raw material for homemade wine, the juice can act as a preservative and the fermentation process will not start, therefore it is recommended to add yeast or raisin sourdough to the container when using cherry juice as a wash. The amount of sugar is doubled.
The yeast must be used live, it is preliminarily softened in a glass of water at room temperature for about 40 minutes. The wort and yeast mixture are brought to the same temperatures (not higher than +25 C) and mix gently.
Further, when the first precipitate falls out, the wine is filtered and left to stand for 2 months, then filtered and poured into storage.
From cherry pulp
Cherry pulp - a mixture of cherry juice with pulp and skin, seeds of berries, prepared by hand. An alcoholic drink is prepared from cherry pulp according to a classic recipe. The wine-making trick, passed down from generation to generation, is that the berries are crushed by hands, but the cherries themselves are not washed.
Fortified wine
Cherry wine with increased strength is prepared with the addition of alcohol. For 15 liters of wort, add 2 glasses of vodka, ferment the wine in the cellar. It is necessary to add the "fixing" element after the 2nd filtration, a week before the final bottling of the finished drink.
With the addition of white currant
The original recipe for cherry wine. White currants make the bouquet of the wine wider and the taste richer. For 3 kilograms of cherry pulp, 2 kilograms of white currant pulp are used. The pulp must be prepared by hand, crushing the berries with your bare hands.
It is not necessary to use yeast and sourdough, the mixture of cherries and white currants lends itself well to natural fermentation.
Frozen cherries
Frozen cherries can be used as raw materials for homemade wine. In this case, it is necessary to use yeast or sourdough as fermentation catalysts. The amount of sugar is doubled over the amount of sweetener in a traditional recipe.
With raspberries
Cherry and raspberry wine has a rich bright red color and sweet aroma. Refers to refreshing drinks, many winemakers call this drink homemade sangria.
The berries are mixed into a pulp in a 1: 1 ratio. Pits are left in the cherries. The berry mix is diluted with water, sugar is added, stirred and left to infuse for natural fermentation. After a week, the pulp is filtered through cheesecloth, and the wort continues to ferment, after a month the first cleaning of the sediment is carried out. A month later, the young wine is ready.
Cherry jam wine
Cherry jam must be diluted with water in a 1: 1 ratio and add raisin sourdough or yeast. There is no need to add sugar. The wort is separated through cheesecloth 10 days after the start of fermentation. After another 3 weeks, the drink is removed from the sediment. Further actions of the winemaker depend on the purpose of obtaining young or aged wine.
Storage rules
It is necessary to store containers with homemade wine in a dark place, the optimum storage temperature is +18 C. Limit light and direct sunlight on the bottles, and check the tightness of closed caps.
The best storage place is a cellar or pantry.
Subject to all storage conditions, homemade wines are stored for several years without losing aroma and taste.
