Favorite fruit to make wine with?

Please don't say grape.

I've made wine and fruitbeers with about ten types of fruit, my favorite (by a long shot) was Jaboticaba.
I think it's also one of the easier wines to make, as the tannins in the skin inhibit microbes and provide a strong flavor.

It's hard to describe how glorious it was, like a deep cherry lambrusco champagne - though that doesn't do it justice.
The dry, bitter notes in the after-taste on the tip of your tongue draw you back for the next sip.

I really regret gifting so much of it, it was lightning in a bottle.


So, what are your favorite fruits to make wine from?

Mustang grapes. Yeast in the skin.

I've also made peach, white grape, and strawberry . Mustang wins everytime.

I haven't made wine.  I aspire to make hard ciders from the various fruits I have in my food forest.  What I imagine I want is raspberry and blueberry infused Meads.  I don't have enough productions yet but I also have big plans for making hard ciders infused with whatever produces a bounty.

I have made some delicious meads and a  few stinkers.   My dream is to have enough mulberry production to make a mulberry mead.  

One of the meads I made was fresh strawberries and lemon balm.  I used way too much lemon balm and the mead tasted like Windex.  

Dandelion wine???

Scott Foster wrote:I haven't made wine.  I aspire to make hard ciders from the various fruits I have in my food forest.  What I imagine I want is raspberry and blueberry infused Meads.  I don't have enough productions yet but I also have big plans for making hard ciders infused with whatever produces a bounty.

I have made some delicious meads and a  few stinkers.   My dream is to have enough mulberry production to make a mulberry mead.  

One of the meads I made was fresh strawberries and lemon balm.  I used way too much lemon balm and the mead tasted like Windex.  

My Great-Grandfather was know for his White Lightning made from apple cider. He would get it nice and fermented, then on a day like today where it is below zero outside (f), he would drill a hole in the cider barrel and draw out the mixture that did not freeze. Obviously that was the really potent stuff. There was not much of it, but really potent.

Kind of a funny farm story during the war.

Back then we had a lot of potatoe ground and he was doing well selling poatoes to the government for the Servicemen. However he needed a way to pick them coming harvest season, so the War Dept sent down the POW's from out of Bangor at the POW camp. They were actually great workers and did a fine job of getting the potatoes in the potatoe house. back then, when that was done, there was a party!

Out came the cider barrels...and that included the guards and POW's.

They went back that night all pretty well lit, so the Comander of the camp came down the next day and asked my Great-Grandfather what he was thinking as he got even the POW's drunk? As it was my Great-Grandfather had (5) boys fighting in against the Germans' to whom he got drunk!

My Great-Grandfather said he did not care, an honest days work was an honest days work and they deserved what they got. But as they talked the Commander of the camp got just as pie-eyed as the POW men the night before so nothing was said of the matter.

Later it was said that German/USA relations went much better because POW's reported back that their treatment in the USA was rather good. I would like to think we had a hand in that.

Gooseberries. I have tons of them but don’t actually like them. However ferment them for a few months and it’s amazing.

My grandfather used to make a stunning nettle wine too but i’ve never been able to replicate it.

I prefer to make liquor things with my fruit (mulberry whiskey or umeshu plum liquor... hard to choose my favorite there) but I also do like to put the fruit in my beer, so it's hard to choose one. ah and dandelion beer might have been the best beer I ever made. no recipe, just playing, it was FABULOUS.

Jabuticabas are awesome, we tend to make syrup out of them and use it for mixers (and pancakes, desserts, etc). I have two pitanga (surinam cherries) that just started and I'm thinking about wine for next year, their flavor is really mild (cherryish plus a pine flavor like jabuticaba) and next year I should get a much larger volume of fruit.

We have been brewing all kinds of sub-par wines over the past year and a half. We try to keep experimenting with each new ferment and our focus is on economy rather than quality. A friend works at a grocery store and he notified us that the owner was preparing to throw out a box of apples that she considered past their prime. We were told they were ours for free if we wanted. The gallon of cider we produced from it cost less than a nickel for the yeast and was proudly labelled "Dumpster Cider #1".

i’ve been making wild-yeast mead for just about 10 years. favorite fruits include wild blueberries (paired with fir tips is great), pawpaw, kousa, blackcaps. dandelion was one the first, and truly great.

I do not drink but make wines every year in 5 gallon batches. According to family and friends, fig wine is the best at a year old.
At 3 years of aging, blackberry is #1.  I only make 5 gallon batches and only use excess fruits from our property. I now even grow the sugarcane. Wish I could grow cork and bottles.

I haven't done it in a while but my favorite is applejack. I used to make a simple apple wine that was then left out to freeze multiple nights while the ice is removed daily making for a more potent beverage. In Alaska where I first learned to make it that stuff would get STRONG. Here, not as much.

Dan Fish wrote:I haven't done it in a while but my favorite is applejack. I used to make a simple apple wine that was then left out to freeze multiple nights while the ice is removed daily making for a more potent beverage. In Alaska where I first learned to make it that stuff would get STRONG. Here, not as much.

It's pretty hard to measure the resulting alcohol volume, but you can calculate the maximum. We've jacked cider that was 15% and gotten it to 51% maximum, but it required cold nights dipping to near -40deg.. It's still surprisingly smooth considering the strength.

We tried brewing cider with added "candied sugar" that was VERY dark. After we jacked it, it felt only right to call it Black Jack.

Hahaha I dig that name. I need to get back into brewing.

When I was making the stuff I actually had a hygrometer but I never thought to use it! I did do a batch where it was outside for 5 days at -50F. It was wild, it turned almost syrupy. The dumb part was the wine that it started from wasn't the best so the end result wasn't the ambrosia it could have been. I think that was actually the last time I made it because I know it was the last year I was up there. Here where I live now we only get down to the low 20s. I guess I could just put it in the freezer, which is a little lower than that.

Now I'm excited about applejack again. Just in time for hot weather...

I've been told by a wine expert that the best wine I made was from butternut squash. I started with cooked squash, not raw, and added brown sugar and a dollop of molasses.

I should try brewing with shark fin squash. I've got so many of them still, and they have a sweetness more like melons than squash.

My favorite fruits are the mombin plum and the jambolana plum (Java plum). I live in Suriname and all of these traditions are wild fruits. Very fruity and very vinous.

Ellendra Nauriel wrote:I've been told by a wine expert that the best wine I made was from butternut squash. I started with cooked squash, not raw, and added brown sugar and a dollop of molasses.

so the squash is just in primary, you didn’t rack onto more squash or anything?

I ferment leftover pineapples skins with panela (unrefined whole cane sugar) also called “guarapo”. We’re now harvesting and eating one pineapple a day. This way we have a constant developing spiky beverage to which we keep feeding skins and panela as we drink til the point it gets way too fun to keep drinking, add mother and leave as our vinegar supply to then start a new batch.

One of my childhood stories when it comes to Wine making....

If you want to make a wine that has a character so close to a red wine that I actually can't post it because you said not using Grapes, have a closer look for the "Sloe" or "Blackthorn" (Prunus Spinosa)

Picking them is a bit of a struggle because of the thorns and they grow single berries spread over the whole tree, so you will get more holes in your skin that berries in the Bucket.

Waiting the first freeze (to break down the bitterness) and then harvest what the birds left.

The outcome will be a delicious wine that is deep dark and can match with a good red wine.

In my opinion an unbeatable alternative to grapes and goes well to all red meats and cheese.


I can only give the recipe: "Sloe Wine drunken by yourself"

as I waited till Grandmother made it and lost over the time the count over her stock in the Cellar, then I met my mates at the fishing lake....

....and finally lost my bicycle in the Lake.

See Hes wrote:


....and finally lost my bicycle in the Lake.

This sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, thanks.

I used to brew cider in college, but haven't in a long time. I'm hoping to give mead a try once our hives get established, and maybe even some mead vinegar (if that's a thing!).

We've made some excellent elderberry/blackberry wine.  Also some just so-so.  I've got a couple of gallons of the latest batch fermenting from last autumn and am looking forward to trying it in the summer.  I've also made rhubarb wine (drinkable), elderflower wine (light and refreshing), elderberry wine (not that great).  And apple cider which is also a bit of a hit and miss--but is the one wine which I don't have to add extra sugar to, which is why I continue to make it:  it's free :)
In the future I hope to make plum cider and perry (pear cider), as my own trees start to produce more, but I can't comment on either of them just yet.

G Freden wrote:We've made some excellent elderberry/blackberry wine.  Also some just so-so.  I've got a couple of gallons of the latest batch fermenting from last autumn and am looking forward to trying it in the summer.  I've also made rhubarb wine (drinkable), elderflower wine (light and refreshing), elderberry wine (not that great).  And apple cider which is also a bit of a hit and miss--but is the one wine which I don't have to add extra sugar to, which is why I continue to make it:  it's free :)
In the future I hope to make plum cider and perry (pear cider), as my own trees start to produce more, but I can't comment on either of them just yet.

Do you normally make then drink, or go the whole aging route? I find the whole testing over years thing really interesting :)

Brian Holmes wrote:

Do you normally make then drink, or go the whole aging route? I find the whole testing over years thing really interesting :)

We usually leave it to age in the demijohn for about a year and then start drinking once we bottle up.  Depending on the batch size, we do end up ageing some inadvertently.  Also if it doesn't taste nice right away, we'll try ageing, usually for at least six months but often for a year or longer.  I finally used up the last bottle of a 2014 elderberry wine just last month.  It still wasn't that great, so I used it for cooking instead--a lot of our cider is used in cooking too :)

G Freden wrote:

Brian Holmes wrote:

Do you normally make then drink, or go the whole aging route? I find the whole testing over years thing really interesting :)

We usually leave it to age in the demijohn for about a year and then start drinking once we bottle up.  Depending on the batch size, we do end up ageing some inadvertently.  Also if it doesn't taste nice right away, we'll try ageing, usually for at least six months but often for a year or longer.  I finally used up the last bottle of a 2014 elderberry wine just last month.  It still wasn't that great, so I used it for cooking instead--a lot of our cider is used in cooking too :)

If all else fails it goes in the pot! I'm hoping to try my hand at making vinegar, these hobbies should dovetail nicely :)

greg mosser wrote:

Ellendra Nauriel wrote:I've been told by a wine expert that the best wine I made was from butternut squash. I started with cooked squash, not raw, and added brown sugar and a dollop of molasses.

so the squash is just in primary, you didn’t rack onto more squash or anything?

I didn't add more squash, although I did add more brown sugar.

G Freden wrote: And apple cider which is also a bit of a hit and miss--but is the one wine which I don't have to add extra sugar to, which is why I continue to make it:  it's free :)

I predict a lot of melon wines in my future for a similar reason. I'm expanding my seed-producing operation, which means growing more fruit than I could possibly eat. And if it's been cut open so I could harvest the seeds, then I can't legally sell the fruit for human consumption. I've been trying to think of what it could be used for, and keep coming back to wines and vinegars.

How about the stuff that made already the Vikings going berserk.

Med or Met

6 lbs good Honey
1.5 Ltr Apple Juice (with pulp)
5 Ltr water
5 grs yeast (best start in in the apple juice)
5 Tablet Yeast Salt
1-2 spoon Flour (or anything where the yeast can hold on)

Drink it warm in the winter (but in reasonable amounts because you won't feel how your hypothermia is killing you.)  

I made Cherry Mead once but screwed it up by adding Sarspirilla to it. Was trying to combine two things I would like on their own into this batch. Was surprised and happy to see how red it was when I first mixed it in. 2nd photo is how it turned out.

Racked


Finished

At various times over the last year the South African government decided that banning the sale of alcohol would be an intelligent way to deal with the pandemic. Ever an innovative bunch, South African's dusted off grandma's pineapple beer recipe and got brewing.

My father and I got our process down pat, although the results varied from batch to batch. The best batch was a crisp, clear, slightly effervescent brew that was the choice beverage on a sunny afternoon. It really was some magic. We could've bottled and sold that for a tidy profit. Until the pineapple farmers (or was it the grocery stores?) caught on and tripled the price of pineapples.

Weird times, the last year has been.