In every major store today you can find any wines: sweet, semi-sweet, dry and fortified, white, red, in a word, all sorts. But, despite this wide choice, some prefer home-made wine.
It is prepared from various types of raw materials, in this article I will tell you how to make wine from cherries.
If you want to get a worthy product, do not forget one important rule - to make wine you need to choose only the best and highest quality fruits. Do not save on raw materials, then cherry wine will delight you with its aroma and astringent taste.
As I have repeatedly had to make sure - with each owner the wine with the same set of ingredients is not the same as the others. Differences in the recipe, selection of raw materials, sourdough and other seemingly insignificant little things greatly change the taste of wine at the exit. So I’ll tell you how, in my opinion, everything needs to be done, and follow these tips or choose other ways, decide for yourself.
So, let's start making wine from cherries by preparing raw materials and sourdough. For a drink from any fruit, these operations are identical. Cherry can be substandard, crooked, small, but it must be healthy, ripe and not rotten. You should carefully sort the raw materials and remove all unfit fruits.
If the cherry is ready, it should be transferred. If there is a special wine press - great, if not, you can use a juicer, or even crush your feet to the music, as in the movie "The Taming of the Shrew." The juice can be used for its intended purpose, for preservation, and the remaining cherry mass (pulp) is suitable for use as a raw material, we will prepare cherry wine using just the pulp.
With leaven a little more complicated, the best is considered one that is used in industry. Such starter culture is grown on wine yeast in laboratory conditions, but it is difficult to get it. So we’ll try to prepare high-quality sourdough wine for cherries at home.
Take care of its preparation should be about two weeks before the day that you have planned for yourself to squeeze the fruit. I usually use raspberries for souring. It is necessary to collect a clean berry and without washing (so as not to wash away bacteria from it), put it into action. That is why I do not advise collecting raspberries after rain. Also, grapes will be a good raw material for starter culture, but it does not grow everywhere. If you will buy it, try to take ours, and not imported, stuffed with various chemistry to the eyeballs.
Now the process itself, we take a capacious jar and pour a glass of water into it, pour half a glass of sugar and a couple of glasses of crushed berries. Having mixed the liquid properly, we tie the neck of the jar with gauze in several layers and expose it to a dark place. After four days, it is necessary to stir and strain the contents of the jar through cheesecloth. The juice that you drain is the leaven.
Cherry wine takes 200-300 grams of starter culture for every ten liters. I make one leaven per year, and if I plan to lay the second after the first batch, then instead of souring I use the precipitate from the first batch. In this case, for every ten liters of wine one hundred grams of sediment is required.
Now that we have both raw materials and sourdough, we will begin the main process. Cherry wine can be made in ten-liter jars, some try to use plastic containers, but I would not recommend it for wine. In a jar we put 5 liters of pulp remaining after extraction, fill it with two liters of water and dilute it all with a syrup made from one and a half kg of sugar dissolved in three liters of water. We tie the neck of the jar with gauze and allow 4 days to wander in the heat, by the end of the fourth day the whole suspension will settle to the bottom, now you need to put a water shutter on the jars and you can not touch them for 4-5 weeks.
After this period, it will be necessary to carefully drain the juice, squeeze the pulp and strain the juice that was squeezed out of it, then both juices are poured together and again bottled with a water lock installed. After 5 weeks, you can pour the finished wine from cans into bottles.
Now that you already know how to make wine from cherries, it remains to wish you success in this not simple, but honorable business.