How to make cherry wine at home – 2 recipes

Cherry season is in full swing, and in some places it is even departing. If you can’t get enough of this delicious berry, close compotes, jams, put it on for the winter and still haven’t used up the entire harvest, it’s time to think about cherry wine – not the most traditional, but very tasty drink!

For some reason, it is believed that it is impossible to make wine from cherries, and it is not suitable for other alcohol – tinctures, liqueurs, moonshine. But I am sure that a delicious booze can be prepared from all or almost all berries-fruits-fruits – there would be a desire and a harvest. For example, cherry liqueurs are very popular in Europe, the Germans make their own kirschwasser from this berry, wine from cherries has long been produced in Spain and some Mediterranean countries. So why are we worse?

In the old days, cherry wines were almost never made, because there was no sugar, and the “rusk” made from such a product turns out to be uninteresting. But who’s stopping you from making sweet wine out of it? Moreover, in our time, any additives are available that can make the drink more stable – tartaric and tannic acid, tannin, resistant yeast for fruit wines. However, you can do without all this.

Wine is made from any cherry. Wild bitter, rich in acids, is best suited for winemaking, but where can you get it in such quantities? But even from the black garden, which in our latitudes is full, you can make an interesting drink – dessert, liqueur or strong. For more information about cherry wines and their additives, see the table.

Table for compiling 10 liters of must for making 8 liters of black cherry wine (acidity – 0,4%; sugar content – 13,5%)

1 – light table wine, 2 – strong table wine, 3 – strong sweet, 4 – dessert and 5 – liqueur wine.

The most popular additive to such wine is lemon or citric acid. I will say from experience – cherry juice itself is not very tasty, sweet, but watery. And immediately after adding a small amount of lemon, the liquid is transformed – it acquires a noble sourness, which sets off the taste of the berry and gives it saturation. They also often make wine from pitted cherries – not because they are too lazy to take them out, but because the pit gives a spicy almond flavor. Almonds in cherries are not felt as strongly as in cherries, so the stone is sometimes even crushed.

Easy cherry wine recipe

I am currently making wine according to this recipe. Everything is quite simple here, from the additives – only lemon, sugar and a little water. I will say right away – a little wild yeast lives on cherries, so if you decide to ferment on them, carefully observe the temperature regime! And better – stock up in advance with special CKD for unstable berry wines. I had to buy more expensive raspberries for the time being in order to make a starter and restart the fermentation, which was interrupted due to the heat – I didn’t keep track.

More exact proportions will be given in the recipe itself.

How to cook:

1. Sort the cherries, those berries in which there is a hint of mold or rot – throw them away. By the way, if you come across leaves, don’t throw them away, they will come in handy for cake liqueur, the recipe of which I will give below.
2. Next, crush the cherries well. I pressed with my hands, but if there are a lot of berries, you can use any other method convenient for you.
3. Measure the amount of the resulting mass (together with the bones). For each liter of pulp, add 250 ml of pure spring water and 3-4 grams of citric acid (I squeezed the juice from a whole lemon).
4. Put everything in a dark warm place to start fermentation. It starts up slowly, to speed up, you can make, for example, raisin sourdough – the recipe is here. Cover the container with gauze.
5. After the start of fermentation (sour smell, foam, hiss – that’s all), the wort must be left for 2 days, every few hours the foam cap must be knocked down, stirring with a wooden spoon so that the mold does not divorce.
6. After 2 days, filter the liquid and squeeze the pulp. Don’t throw away the squeezes just yet.
7. Measure the volume of the resulting wort and add 100-120 grams of sugar and 1.5-2 grams of tannin (if you use it) for each liter. Everything is placed under a water seal for rapid fermentation at a temperature not higher than 22-24 degrees.
8. After the fermentation is over, the young wine must be decanted – removed from the sediment, and poured into another container almost under the neck. Place a water seal on the bottle again and move it to a cool place, optimally – to the basement.
9. The wine is fermented for 1-2 months, when the sediment appears, it needs to be decanted again.
10. When the wine is ready, you can add sugar or alcohol to it to fix it. It is better to make such a drink sweet (to be guided by taste), and alcohol is added at the rate of 50 ml per liter of wine. Bottled, corked and kept in the cellar for as long as patience is enough, best of all – a year.

UPD 4.07.2016/XNUMX/XNUMX: a small report from the author

Cherry wine is finally ready! What can I say – those who say that this is not an interesting drink, either blatantly lie or defame it out of ignorance. Vinishko is very pleasant, the taste is whole, pronounced, but unobtrusive. Now I regret that I did so little. After the fermentation was over, I fixed the wine with cherry tincture and sweetened it to the dessert level, but this could not have been done – it is quite interesting in the cracker version. In general – I recommend!

Bonus: recipe for cherry tincture on squeezes

This homemade cherry wine recipe involves the preparation of a by-product – pomace tincture. Well, what can I do, I don’t like to throw anything away, and many tinctures, for example, my tincture on mountain ash in this way turns out much better than on a whole berry – it’s checked!

The drink is easy to make. All the cake left from the cherries is taken, along with the seeds – I have about a 2-liter jar left and pour vodka (or better – 50% sorted) right up to the neck. You can also add 2-3 cherry leaves there. Further – infusion in a warm place, daily shaking. After 3-4 weeks, the liquid must be filtered and squeezed out.

The result will be a dark red infusion with a bright aroma of almonds and a characteristic flavor of fermented cherries, somewhat reminiscent of cherry tincture. You can drink it just like that, diluted with sugar syrup to taste, or add, for example, lemon zest, cinnamon, cloves and other ingredients traditionally used for cherry liqueurs, stand for some more time and then sweeten. If the recipe for homemade cherry wine involves fixing, it will be fixed with an ideologically given tincture. In addition, cocktail cherries can be aged in such a drink.

Dessert cherry wine with pits

Sweet, full-bodied black cherry wine with a slightly spicy aroma is made exclusively from juice, without water, with the addition of sugar and, of course, tartaric and tannic acid. The drink is fermented on a pure culture of yeast, it is best to choose yeast for port wine.

Preparation:

1. Sort the cherries and separate from the pits, set aside 5% of the pits – they are needed for wine.
2. Unwashed berries are crushed and left in a wide-mouthed dish covered with gauze for a couple of days – during this time they will slightly ferment and the juice will separate more easily.
3. After two days, squeeze the juice – even manually, even with the help of a juicer, it does not matter.
4. Add acids to the resulting liquid (if the juice is less than 10 liters, the number of ingredients must be recalculated in proportion) and 2/3 of sugar – about 2.6 kg, as well as the bones that we have left. Mix everything well, add wine yeast and put under a water seal.
5. Rapid fermentation of this wine is recommended to be carried out as quickly as possible, so the bottle is placed, if possible, in a warm place, with a temperature of at least 20 °, but not more than the maximum indicated on the package with your yeast.
6. After the water seal has stopped bubbling, the wine is drained from the sediment and the rest of the sugar is added to it. Everything is poured into a suitable bottle so that the wine occupies 90% of the volume.
7. A water seal is again put on the container, the drink is set aside for quiet fermentation, this time in a cool place.
8. Silent fermentation lasts 1.5-2 months, decanting every 2-3 weeks if there is sediment. After this term, the wine is drained from the sediment for the last time and bottled.

Homemade cherry wine made according to this recipe can be tasted in a couple of months, but it will fully gain taste only after six months.

The Rum Diary wishes you a bountiful harvest! Remember – delicious alcohol can be made from almost all berries and fruits, and we will try to bring you as many good recipes for its preparation as possible!