Category: Wine

Last month I finally got around to making wine from the cherries we picked last summer from the cherry trees growing on the grounds of nearby St. Francis Seminary. I had them stored in the freezer and I set them out to thaw for a few days last month. We has picked a little more than 20 pounds which should be enough for a decent 3 gallon batch of wine.

After the cherries had thawed they released a lot of their juice, freezing the fruit helps break the cell walls and causes the juice to flow. I took a gravity reading if the juice and it was 1.050 pretty sweet considering it didn’t tase terribly sweet. I chaptalized with about 4 cups of white sugar and also added about a gallon and a half of water. Tossed in some pectic enzyme and pitched Montrachet yeast the next morning. The starting gravity was 1.087.

Three weeks later I pressed the cherries and transferred the wine to a 3 gallon carboy. Gravity at pressing was 1.002, I expect to to go down to around 0.995 before it finishes.

I didn’t press the cherries too terribly hard, I didn’t want to damage any of the pits and add excessive tannin to the wine. I also saved the pressed cherries and put them back into the freezer with the intent of adding them to a future beer.

The wine at pressing was decent, though pretty tart, I’m not sure this will be too great if I leave it dry.

Last year my friend and fellow wine maker Steve gave us about 25 pounds of elderberries. We took them home and threw them in the freezer. This past winter we had to make room in the freezer so it was time to make Elderberry wine.

Elderberries are a big pain in the butt to process. Tons of them grow on these very thin stems that you don’t really want to have in your fermentor. So you have to destem them, actually freezing the berries and stems first helps in this process. However it still took two evenings of destemming to get through them all. Additionally the edlerberries are a deep reddish purple and they like to stain things.

Elderberries have very little sugar of their own so making wine from them is pretty much impossible without chaptalizing. I added around 10 pounds of sugar as well as water to bring my volume to 5.5 gallons. The starting gravity was 1.102 and I pitched Premier Cuvee yeast.

After about a week of fermentation I pressed the wine gently to remove the berries and transferred it to a secondary it was nearly done fermenting by then and had a good flavor. Most recipes for elderberry wine say to sweeten it but I think this could make a pretty decent dry wine after a few years of aging.