Sweet chery wine recipe
If you have enough berries, I suggest you look up this simple sweet cherry wine recipe. In a few months you’ll get excellent beverage which you can put on the table with no shame. Aside from the sweet cherries you’ll need sugar, citric acid, and water.
Only ripe untainted berries are fit for sweet cherry wine. Even one tainted or moldy fruit can spoil the whole beverage, take care of cleanliness. Used containers must be squeaky clean and wiped dry. You can make wine from any variety of sweet cherry: yellow, black, pink, forest or white, but the best beverages with a delicate aroma can be made from yellow berries. Forest berries are on the second place.
Ingredients:
- Sweet cherries – 22 lb / 10 kg
- Sugar – 2.2 lb / 1 kg
- Water – 0.13 gal / 0.5 liter
- Citric acid – 0.88 oz / 25 gr
- Wine Yeast (Incase there is not enough, wild yeast’s on cherries)
It’s better not to wash the sweet cherries in order to save wild yeasts on their surface, thanks to which the must will ferment. Very dirty berries should be cleaned with a dry cloth. Sweet wine fanciers can increase the amount of sugar by 25%. Citric acid is required to stabilize the wine; it improves the taste and facilitates longer storing (sweet cherries natural acidity is very low).
Sweet Cherry Wine Recipe
- Remove the seeds without spilling juice; it has to remain in the same amount like pulp. Seeds provide an almond taste which spoils the wines taste.
- Add water, stir it up. Tie up the bottleneck with gauze and leave it for 2-3 days in a dark place with a room temperature. Stir it once a day with clean hands or with a wooden spoon to knock down “the hat” from the pulp and peels on the surface.
- In case of foaming, appearing of a hissing sound and a sour smell, filter the juice through gauze into a fermentation container. Squeeze the pulp thoroughly.
- Add 14 oz / 400 grams of sugar and citric acid, stir it and install an airlock. Leave the container in a dark room with a temperature of 65-81F° / 18-27°C.
cherry wine fermentation
- After 4 days, pour 0.25 gal / 1 liter of the must into a separate container, and dissolve 10.5 oz / 300 grams of sugar in it, stir it well and make sure sugar dissolves. Pour the obtained syrup back into the container and install the airlock once again. Repeat this procedure after 3 days by adding remaining sugar (10.5 oz / 300 grams) into the must.
- After 20-45 days the wine will become brighter, there will be sediment at the bottom and the airlock will stop emitting gas/bubbling. This means that active fermentation has stopped and it’s time to separate the wine from the sediment through a narrow tube into another container.
- Tightly seal the container and then leave it for aging in a dark place with a temperature of 50-61F° / 10-16°C.
- After 3-12 months (the more, the better) the homemade sweet cherry wine should be cleared from the sediment once again, bottled for storing and hermetically sealed. You can keep it in a fridge or a basement, its shelf-life is 3-4 years.