Holiday Left Overs- Fruit Cake Wine...

I've got about 10 apples, 5 bananas, 8 oranges and 3 kumquats left over from the holidays. They are starting to... turn. They're getting spots and the bananas are black. I don't want to waste them, so I'm going to experiment with them and make a multi-fruit wine.

My LBS is closed until Wednesday and all I got is a small pack of distiller's yeast. My brother got it for me about two months ago and I've never used it before. Will this work okay? I'm not expecting this to taste like a $100 bottle of wine, but it's currently the only thing I've got.

What I've imagined so far, is I'm going to take and core the apples, peel the oranges and bananas, through them in the blender and then add some water, a little sugar, and boil. Once done, I had planned to filter the solids, although I was wondering if, if I don't, they will drop out during fermentation?

Anybody ever attempted something like this before? I shall call it, Fruit Cake Wine. Any suggestions on how this will turn out or what proportions I should use?

I wouldn't use distillers yeast- that stuff is not going to give you good results. I would wait for some wine yeast.

I wouldn't boil the fruit- that would set the pectins (think jelly) and make it so the wine would never clear and also give you a "cooked fruit" taste which probably wouldn't be very good. You could use one campden tablet per gallon of wine (crushed and dissolved) and stir that well into the must. Wait 24 hours for the campden to do its work, and then add the yeast.

I'd recommend adding some pectic enzyme in with the must, since you'll wait to avoid a pectin haze.

What is the purpose of adding the campden tablet before adding the yeast? My initial thought was that it wouldn't allow the added yeast to ferment at all, and I was confused. My guess would be that it would keep the natual yeasts from fermenting anything, but I'm really not sure.

brianmp said:

What is the purpose of adding the campden tablet before adding the yeast? My initial thought was that it wouldn't allow the added yeast to ferment at all, and I was confused. My guess would be that it would keep the natual yeasts from fermenting anything, but I'm really not sure.

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Campden added at the mixing of the must kills the wild yeast and bacteria naturally present on fruit. You then wait 24 hours to add the wine yeast, although it could probably be added sooner. Wine yeast are not particularly susceptible to sulfites, that's why sulfites are commonly used in winemaking.