This peculiar vegetable wine will definitely impress connoisseurs of extraordinary drinks. It stands out because of its light aftertaste of greens and almost complete absence of any aroma. The shade depends on the variety of marrows, but usually, it turns out yellowy with a shade of green.
Before starting out make sure that all of the containers are steamed in order to prevent contamination of yet to be marrow wine.
Ingredients:
- Marrows – 2 kilos
- Water – 4 liters
- 3 lemons (or 15 grams of citric acid)
- Sugar – 1 kilo
- Unwashed raisins – 50 grams (or wine yeast)
Lemons are required to stabilize the acidity since marrows themselves don’t have enough acid. Without additional acidification, fermentation will be weak.
Caution! Some winemakers suggest adding usual dry or baker’s yeast, but doing so will ultimately yield a homebrew with peculiar odor and harsh flavor instead of wine.
Marrow Wine Recipe
If you’re running short of wine yeast, you can prepare a wine ferment from raisins or fresh berries 3-5 days prior to cooking the marrows. Raspberries, currants and other berries will do fine.
To do this, put the unwashed raisins in a jar, add 25 grams of sugar and top it off with 150 ml of room temperature water. Stir and tie the neck of the jar with cheesecloth. Then move it to a warm dark place. If you start noticing foaming, hissing, and sour smell (usually after 2-3 days), this means that your ferment is ready to be used.
If you notice moldiness, this means that the ferment is infected and should be remade using other raw materials.
Wash the marrows, cut them into a few pieces, core and remove the seeds. Grate the pulp along with the peel till homogenous using a mincer or blender. Put the obtained puree in an enamel stock pot with a wide neck. Top off with boiling water, stir, and cover. Leave the pot for 24 hours.
Strain the contents of the stock pot through several layers of cheesecloth and squeeze out the pulp. Add 0.5 kilos of sugar, citric acid, and ferment or wine yeast to the marrow juice and stir.
Decant the mash into a fermentation container and fill it up to 75% to leave enough space for the next batch of sugar, foam, carbon dioxide. Install an airlock of any design on the neck of the container.
The glove is inflated, thus its fermenting
Move the container with the yet-to-be marrow wine to a dark place with the temperature of 18-27°C. After 5 days remove the airlock and decant 0.5 liters of the fermenting mash and the dissolve 250 grams of sugar in it. Pour the obtained syrup back into the container and seal it with the airlock. After another 5 days repeat the same procedure and add the last sugar batch (250 grams).
Depending on the temperature and yeast activity homemade marrow wine fermentation lasts for 25-60 days. You’ll know fermentation is over when the airlock is no longer emitting gas and there’s a layer of sediment at the bottom. Decant the fermented wine through a thin straw into another container without sediment.
Taste the drink. Optionally sweeten it with sugar to your taste or increase its potency with vodka or ethanol (2-15% of the volume). In this case, increasing the ABV does not affect the taste or flavor.
Fill the storage containers to the brim and seal them. If you’ve added sugar, keep the airlock on for the first 7-10 days just in case fermentation starts again. Move the marrow wine for aging to a cold dark place with a temperature of 5-16°C (a fridge or cellar). Leave it for 3-4 months. Decant the wine once every 20-30 days to remove 3-5 cm of sediment forming at the bottom.
Yellow marrow wine
Once the sediment is no longer forming, your marrow wine is ready and you can bottle it. Homemade marrow wine has ABV of 10-12%, and It can be stored in a cellar for up to 2 years.