Melon Wines at Home – 3 Proven Recipes

Summer is coming to an end and you haven’t had enough time to experiment with fruit wines? Not a problem – there are still melons! Despite popular belief, you can make excellent sweet and strong wine from these fruits – just pick good, fragrant fruits and make a little effort, and the melon will delight you with its sunny taste all year long, reminding you of the irrevocably gone Indian summer!

Melon gives limitless scope for experiments and experiments with homemade alcohol. For example, melon liqueurs a la Midori are excellent, they make liqueurs and fragrant brandy with it. At home, melon wines are rarely made, but in vain – the drink turns out wonderful, with a delicate golden color, a light unobtrusive aroma and a full taste, which is well worth the effort. Such wine is occasionally even produced in the factory – for example, Turkish melon wine is very popular, tourists note that this is, in principle, one of the few types of Turkish-made alcohol that can be consumed without much disgust. And homemade wine, carefully made “by these very hands”, from high-quality raw materials, and even normally aged, is an undoubted pride of the winemaker!

Making melon wine at home – principles and nuances

Wine from watermelon and melon is a rare thing, but it is found, for example, we devoted one of the previous articles to watermelon wine. The reason for this is the somewhat incorrect composition of the “giant berries” – gourds, after all. Melons contain few acids and too much water – up to 91%, but they have enough sugar – about 16%. In addition, like almost all pumpkin, melon is quite fibrous and it is quite difficult to squeeze juice from it normally to make a drink using pure “white” technology. However, everything is solvable – you just need to tinker a little more with filtration and acidify the must with special wine-making additives, lemon or apple juice.

It is better to ferment such wine on pure wine yeast, savages in this case do not work well. If there is absolutely trouble with CKD, you can make a starter from raspberries or raisins. You need to choose fragrant and fully ripe melons, the best varieties for this business are Tiger, Golden Amaril, Muza, Bereginya, Gift of the Sun – in general, any fragrant melons will do, the stronger the smell, the tastier the wine. In general, enough ranting – we’ll talk about the nuances in the recipes.

Basic melon wine recipe

The “correct” winemaking technology that will give a 100% acceptable result is a strong, sweet, very aromatic wine with a beautiful yellow color and a fairly strong aroma. Be sure to add acids – either special wine (they can be purchased in online stores), or – improvised, such as lemon or apple juice.

It is better to use wine yeast, so the wort ferments faster, gains more degrees and will be stored without problems.

1. We cut off the peel from melons, along with the inedible white part, without being greedy – we only need juicy, fragrant pulp. We remove the seed nest along with the seeds and grind the fruits in any convenient way, the goal is to squeeze the juice.
2. From the indicated amount of melons, 8-8.5 liters of juice should be obtained. You can extract it as you like – in a press, a juicer, or simply by finely cutting a melon and squeezing it through several layers of gauze. Yes, the process is unpleasant, but necessary – we do not need extra pulp in the must. Push-ups should be done as quickly as possible so that the pulp comes into contact with air as little as possible.
3. Dissolve yeast in warm water. If you use raisin starter, it should be prepared in advance, as – read in this article. In melon juice, stir sugar and acids or juice of lemons, apples. You can and even need to try the must – it should be sweet, with a noticeable sourness, if there is not enough sugar or acid to your taste – their content should be increased, because all melons are different.
4. Now we pour the wort into a fermenter or a bottle, add the earned yeast and top dressing and put it under a hydro or at worst “glove” shutter. Set aside in a dark warm place.
5. Within a day or two, the wine should begin to show signs of life – hiss and gurgle, release foam and a corresponding sour smell. Everything is going well – fermentation lasts from 10 days to a month, depending on what kind of yeast you used and how warm the room is. As soon as the water seal stopped gurgling, the glove deflated, the wine cleared, and sediment appeared at the bottom of the bottle – it must be drained with a straw.
6. Next, the young wine must be poured into another container, smaller, so that the liquid occupies at least 3/4 of the volume of the bottle, rearrange it in a dark – but this time cool – place and leave for another 2-3 months. During this time, the drink will completely lighten up, acquire a characteristic straw color. When the sediment falls, the wine needs to be decanted, this is done at least 3-4 times during the secondary fermentation.

Fully clarified homemade melon wine needs to be bottled and aged for at least six months, after which you can start tasting!

Turkish melon wine recipe – with heat treatment of raw materials

This recipe will allow much less fiddling with squeezing the juice – the high temperature will do some of the work for us. They say that heat treatment slightly changes the taste of melon – it becomes more “vegetable”, but with aging, this drawback is smoothed out. But the aroma during boiling, indeed, is lost and is no longer restored. So decide for yourself how to make melon wine – the recipes are quite varied, as they say, for every taste.

This melon wine recipe uses an exceptionally pure yeast culture. Top dressing is not required, but desirable.

1. Peel the melons and cut into cubes of any size. Boil water in a saucepan, add sugar, add lemon juice. Cook, skimming off the foam, until the sugar is completely dissolved. Slices of melon are sent to the boiling mixture and boiled for 10 minutes over low heat, so that the pulp completely softens and gives up all the water.
2. Now the mixture should be cooled to 30 degrees and poured into the fermenter right along with the pulp. Add yeast according to the instructions on the package, top dressing. Install a water seal on the container.
3. After the end of the primary fermentation – after 10-20 days, the wine should be immediately drained from the pulp and transferred to a smaller container, almost to the brim, which should be placed in a dark, cool place until completely clarified.

This melon wine is not stored as well as the previous one, but it does not require long aging either – you can try it after the end of the quiet fermentation stage, that is, after 2-3 months.

Melon and yellow raspberry wine

Of course, raspberries are already departing by the main harvest of melons, both yellow and any other. For this recipe for melon wine, you can use the early ones, when the raspberries are still in bulk – then we won’t need purchased yeast, since raspberries ferment exceptionally well, we have already discussed this in the article on raspberry wine. You can also use ordinary autumn melons and frozen raspberries, but then only CKD, otherwise nothing.

We will assume that we have ripe, freshly harvested, not washed raspberries, fragrant melons and that’s it – raspberries contain enough acids to compensate for their lack in melon. However, if you have an excess of tannic acid, adding 20 grams to the wort will not hurt. The cooking technology is much simpler than in the two previous recipes.

1. Raspberries are not washed – just sorted. We clean the melon from the peel and seed nests, cut into pieces. We crush the fruits with a rolling pin or simply with our hands to a mushy state and leave them in a container with a wide neck for one or two days. The mass should form a dense foam cap – it must be knocked down, stirring the wort so that it does not mold.
2. After a couple of days, carefully squeeze the pulp with a press or gauze. We should get about 10 liters of juice. Add 2/3 of sugar there, stir well and put under a water seal or glove, in a dark place with a temperature of about 20-25 degrees. If everything went well, during the day the glove will inflate, the shutter will begin to bubble, and active fermentation will begin in the wort. If not, read this helpful article.
3. Fermentation with wild yeast will take longer than with CKD – ​​up to five weeks. During this time, we will need to add the remaining third of the sugar to the wort, this must be done twice, for example, a week and two after the start of fermentation. After the wine clarifies and stops gurgling, it must be drained from the sediment, moved to a smaller container and sent to a cool place for secondary fermentation.
4. During the secondary fermentation, the wine will be clarified, forming a dense sediment at the bottom – it will need to be drained using a straw at least 3-4 times. After a couple of months, the drink is ready for bottling.

Properly prepared at home wine from melon and raspberry has a bright golden color, rich smell and taste, it is perfectly stored. The drink will fully reveal its flavor and aroma properties approximately after six months of storage – we assure you, it’s worth the wait!