More fruit wine stuff

Here is a little article from the Mankato Free press in Minnesota.




Wine not?
By Jean Lundquist, Special to the Free Press
The Free Press


ST PETER— A chance glance at a folder containing wine recipes at a garage sale 12 years ago provided Linda Paulson with a new passion.
She bought the folder plus some wine-making supplies and has been making wine at her rural St. Peter home ever since.
The thing is, she doesn’t use grapes, unless it’s to fill in for some other fruit. As the Paulsons have learned, all it takes is a source of something sweet to make country wines or fruit wines.
“You can make wine from anything,” she said.
She and her husband, Jon, even made two separate wines from squash and onion one year. Because they have a big and bountiful garden, not to mention recipes, they decided to give it a try. It tasted, however, like squash and onions, so that was the one and only time.
They also made wine out of a flower once.
“For dandelion wine, you only use the yellow part,” Linda said.
They were sitting outside separating the yellow petals from their green bases, when a gust of wind scattered their work.
Ground cherries also proved to be too much work for wine making. When they’re ripe and fall off the plant, they’re encased in a dry husk that needs to be removed. Lots of labor involved, considering a large number of ground cherries still can mean a small quantity of fruit.
Luckily, wine made from most fruits is much easier to achieve.
“Our favorite is crabapple wine with raisins,” Linda said.
Here’s how they do it ...
Six pounds of fruit are required to make a batch of wine. The Paulsons use six-gallon glass fermentation jugs, called carboys. The carboys also are available in smaller and larger sizes. Recipes are geared toward the size of carboy used.
In a five-gallon bucket, Linda puts the washed fruit and adds two pounds of sugar. She pours two gallons of boiling water on it, mixes it, and let’s it sit overnight to cool.
In the morning, she adds yeast, several acids and acid mixtures to aid in fermentation, having learned to add a bit more tartaric acid to keep the wine from being bitter. She puts a loose cover on the bucket and stirs it once a day for a week.
One nice thing about wine, Linda says, it’s forgiving.
“People who brew beer have to pay a lot more attention to when they do things,” she said. “With wine, you have a day or two either way to get it all done.”
From the five-gallon bucket, the mixture is strained through a tight-woven cloth to remove juice from the seeds and skins. From there, it goes to the carboy. A cork with a “bubbler” is placed on top of the carboy, and the fermentation process begins in earnest.
The bubbler is a one-way valve that allows the gases created in fermentation to escape, but no air or bacteria enters the juice. At the same time, sediment falls to the bottom.
One of the secrets to good homemade wine, Linda says, is to not let the wine sit on the sediment too long. When the sediment is about an inch thick on the bottom, she siphons it off into another carboy. The process is called “racking.” Depending on how much more sediment falls, another racking process may be needed.
Wine started in the fall will be done, on average, in February, and will be ready to bottle. The Paulsons have 50 cases of wine bottles in their barn that people have saved for them just waiting to be filled.

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