How to make wine from jam at home – a detailed recipe

Finally, “Rum” got to this controversial topic! At the mention of “wine from jam”, most experienced winemakers immediately switch to obscene vocabulary – they say, only moonshine can be made from such raw materials, and even that … However, there are also such enthusiasts who made, appreciate and consume this product. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. It is possible to do something. But not from any jam, not without additives, in the presence of exceptionally direct hands and useful information. And we will try to provide the last!

Runet is filled with a bunch of dubious recipes for homemade wine from jam – from the missing, sour, moldy, and from absolutely any fruit, and with rice, and barley (what?), With water and sugar, raisins and yeast … “Devonki” on culinary sites applaud and thrill. You stuff like this into a bottle the rotted hundred-year-old substance from the basement, which no one knows who cooked and from what, sugar there – and more! – well water, yeast for pies, what kind of cereal, you cover it all with a glove (for some reason, a normal shutter is considered bad manners in this matter), after a month you will dive in with a scoop, with a sense of your own talent you will overturn … And you instantly understand that you need to understand the topic more carefully and look for information in trusted sources. Well, let’s try to figure it out.

Which jam is suitable for homemade wine, and which is not?

Wine is a naturally fermented drink. Even if it was made with the participation of sugar and digested raw materials, this fact remains a fact – even call it wine, even mash, but you will have to drink directly what man’s main friends, yeast, made from our raw materials. If moonshine can be expelled from almost any jam – well, in extreme cases, you get sugar sam, a raw material for tinctures – then wine will not tolerate such a negligent attitude. By simply pouring “whatever comes from the cellar” into the fermenter, you will end up with a cloudy alcoholic compote with an indistinct taste and a dull smell. We do not need such profanity!

By the way, if your experiment with wine fails, don’t be discouraged – you can always use it as a semi-finished product for making moonshine from jam – look for the recipe here.

For starters – the method of making jam

• Classic jam in the proportion of sugar to berries 1:1 – this is probably in everyone’s pantry. The worst option. When cooking for at least an hour, all flavoring compounds, complex phenols, came out of the fruit; during long-term storage, acetates and acids of a difficultly predictable nature and effect on the body could be formed instead. Such jam can be used only if there is absolutely nowhere to put it and if it is made from the right fruits or berries, quite acidic, with a very bright taste.
• Jelly and jellied jams. We rule out immediately. The product is, of course, delicious and usually contains much less sugar than jam. But gelling mixtures are, most often, pectin, which turns into methylene during fermentation. Do we need it? This also includes jam, marmalade and other viscous slimy delights.
• “Five Minute” – fruits or berries are simply boiled in syrup or even poured directly into the jar. Raw materials are much better than the previous two. In the berries, there were enough acids, aromatics, taste necessary for fermentation.
• “Vitamins” – fruits twisted with sugar. This is the ideal for us! Homemade wine made from “jam”, the recipe of which does not include heat treatment, turns out to be the brightest, most fragrant and tasty. For example, wine made from currant grated with sugar is almost the same as blackcurrant wine made from fresh berries. Moreover, it is the “vitamins” that especially often begin to ferment on their own.

The second is a variety of fruits

We need berries and fruits that contain a lot of acids, tannins, tannins, but little pectin, which gives turbidity in the drink and releases ethyl alcohol.

1. Black currant or raspberries – the best choice! From raspberry and currant jam, wine is most often obtained with a fairly bright aroma, beautiful color, transparent, tasty. This can also include, for example blackberry, kizil, barberry, irgu, grew up. Great wine comes from gooseberry – with a characteristic sourness, almost transparent beautiful color.
2. The situation is worse with sweet berries – strawberries, blueberries, blueberries. Little aroma, few acids and tannins – the wine will have to be further acidified for normal fermentation and a balanced taste. What and how – we’ll talk further.
3. Stone. When cooked in sugar syrup, hydrocyanic acid contained in the seeds of some berries, as you know, is neutralized – unlike wine from fresh fruits, wine from cherry jam, for example, it is completely safe, the path wanders on the pulp for at least two months. But such raw materials give the drink an exquisite almond flavor – when amygdalin breaks down, benzaldehyde is formed, an aromatic compound with a pleasant spicy smell. For the same reason, such exotics as jam from elderberry or bird cherry. Plum, apricot, peach behave worse in this role, as they contain a lot of pectin, because of which the wine will be clarified for a long time and hard.
4. Apple and pear. Jam from these fruits is perfect for making moonshine, but the wine gives a weak, poorly stored, watery, and also almost always cloudy – again, due to pectins.
5. Mixtures of jams. Classic: plum-cherry-raspberry, apple-currant, mixture of red and black currants, cherry-apricot, peach cherry… It is advisable to dilute sweet, spineless jams with rich, bright berry jams – it is these mixtures that ultimately produce the best fruit and berry wines.

The third is the state of jam

Before you make wine from jam at home, think about what is more important for you – to process low-quality raw materials or to get a delicious drink? No brainer that the better the material, the better the product. Do not believe unprofessional recipes – you won’t get anything sensible from sour jam, and even more so moldy or rotten, no matter how many times you digest it and don’t dilute it with anything! Our jam should smell good, not contain on the lid or jar – especially from the inside – traces of fungus, rust and other foreign substances.

But from candied jam, as well as from slightly fermented, you can make a completely suitable drink. In the latter case, it may even be possible to make wine from jam without yeast – but not a fact, because you never know what exactly is fermenting in a jar. Perhaps fermentation will stop at the most inopportune moment. Therefore, before making wine from fermented jam, it is still better to pre-prepare raisin or raspberry sourdough.

How to make wine from jam at home? Detailed guide

We give one recipe, but the ultimate and variable. In any case, both the principles and the steps for making the drink will be identical. Regardless of the type of jam used, we operate only with such ingredients as the raw material itself, water, acidifier (an acidic mixture for wine, tartaric and tannic acid, at least – lemon juice), yeast (either “savages” or a pure culture of wine yeast from a bag ), optionally – a variety of top dressing for yeast, tannin, pectin enzyme. I advise you to immediately discard such nonsense as wine on rice and jam – well, think for yourself, what will rice do here? Why is it needed? If you want to experiment, better make rice wine, here is its recipe. For obvious reasons, we do not use sugar – in the feedstock it is already even more than necessary.

The first and most important stage is the preparation of the wort

Actually, only at this stage, the preparation of homemade wine from jam differs significantly from the preparation of ordinary grape or any other wine. We need to make the right wort, that is, to provide normal sugar content, density, acidity for fermentation and to introduce viable yeast. So, we need:

A wine sugar meter can be used to properly compose the wort. However, in this case, it is unlikely to give the correct results either – after all, diluted jam is not juice at all, neither in density nor in other indicators. There is only one conclusion – try and try again! The proportions of jam and water are approximate, some types of jam require a little more water, some a little less. The wort should be sweet, but not too sweet – no more than 20% sugar content, including the fruit’s own sugar and introduced at the jam preparation stage.

The second hitch is acidity. There is a jam that does not require the addition of additional acid at all – for example, currant, raspberry, sour apple jam, etc. In most cases, it is necessary, especially for low-acid fruits – apples, plums, cherries, and so on. It is better to replace citric acid with an acid mixture for wine (tartaric, tannic and other acids) or at least juice of fresh lemons.

And the third is yeast. I recommend using only pure yeast cultures – you can buy CKD at any winemaker’s store, order by mail or in any other way. This is the easiest, fastest, most reliable and guaranteed quality option. Naturally, we immediately refuse baker’s yeast, too lazy to even explain why. You can also make wine from jam without yeast – to be precise, it’s not “without yeast”, but “with wild yeast”, which can be obtained by making sourdough with raisins or raspberries – recipes are here and here, respectively.

In general, we dilute our jam with water (if there is a suspicion that it is spoiled, you can boil it additionally), add acid, tannin, mix thoroughly, bring the temperature to 25-30 degrees and add yeast or sourdough. We close it with a water seal, a glove (at this stage you can even just gauze) and with bated breath we wait for several hours until the wort is played out.

Wort setting and fermentation

Once the must has begun to ferment, our detailed instructions turn into a simple fruit wine recipe. Jam wine is not made using the “red” technology, since all the taste, aroma and color have already been removed from the fruit during the jam cooking process, however, it does not hurt to slightly ferment the pulp – it will give more syrup and will gather on top of the container in the form of a “cap”, which can be easily removed and squeezed out. So let’s do it – as soon as violent fermentation began, our “compote” began to spew bubbles, exude a pleasant sour smell familiar to every winemaker, and all the pulp was concentrated on top – we remove the latter with a colander, squeeze it through gauze or muslin. At this stage, you can and even need to try the liquid in order to adjust the sugar content and acidity with available means.

For fermentation, pour the wort into a container of a suitable volume so that it occupies about 75% of the space – the rest of the space will be occupied by a foam cap. From above we install a water seal (well, or a glove, an option for retrophages), make sure that the shutter gurgles or the glove is inflated, and transfer the fermenter to a dark place with a constant temperature of about 18-23 degrees.

Depending on temperature and thousands of other factors, primary fermentation can last from 5-14 days (on a pure yeast culture) to one and a half or even more months – on a yeast sourdough. In any case, while inside the bottle there is a movement of layers, bubbling, the shutter rumbles, and the glove still “sends greetings from the USSR”, we don’t touch or turn over the wort, without preventing the yeast from continuing its proud work. As soon as the fermentation is over, we drain the liquid from the sediment through a tube, if necessary, we clarify it using one of these methods.

secondary fermentation. Bottling and storage

We got young wine from jam with yeast, or rather with their remnants. The process will continue for a long time, albeit slowly. In order for it to flow correctly, the vino needs to be poured into a smaller bottle, so that the liquid occupies 90-95% of the volume – no less, this is an important point! We rearrange the fermenter in the basement or other room with a constant low temperature, ideally – 13-15 degrees. We put the water seal in place – let it gurgle again.

In the process of secondary fermentation, the yeast will finally “finish its own”, the wine will be clarified, gaining aroma and taste. The corpses of yeast, together with the remnants of insoluble substances from the raw materials, will fall out in the form of a dense, homogeneous precipitate – it must be disposed of by decanting as needed, once a month or two. Fermentation lasts up to 3-5 months, its completion is determined by the complete clarification of the wine, dry taste and the absence of a hint of sediment.

Now our wine can be “finished” – sweetened a little if necessary or fixed for better storage – read in this article how and why to do this. It is advisable to keep the finished wine in a warm place for a little longer to make sure that fermentation has not resumed. If everything is fine, we bottle the drink. According to the recipe, homemade wine from jam should “rest” in a dark, cool place for at least another six months, after which you can slowly start tasting. Be it!