Tomato wine... fun use for your excess garden tomatoes.

If you're like me and garden as well as brew, you probably have way too many ripe/over-ripe tomatoes right now, and to keep up you're giving them away to friends, constantly making salsa and freezing tomato sauce batches for the winter.

I found a cool recipe in the book "Making Wild Wines and Meads" for tomato wine, which I just sampled for the first time, and it was delicious! I didn't know what to expect honestly, and it's still very young (< one month old), but it's good.

I don't think it would be appropriate to recreate the recipe in full here due to copyright, but it uses 3lbs of tomatoes per gallon, with apple juice concentrate and montrachet yeast. I'm sure you can find similar recipes online for free.

The apple flavor is definitely more pronounced at the moment, but you can detect underlying tomato and a lot of tartness due to the acidity in the tomatoes. It's very interesting and has a residual sweetness that seems to exceed it's gravity reading.

I scaled to a 3.5gal batch, but after two rackings I'm already down to 2gals due to the massive amount of pulp left behind, so plan accordingly.

My tomato wine recipe is posted in the database (or under my avatar under "recipes". It's not actually my recipes, as I got it from Jack Keller's website and made a few tweaks. My notes are included.

Do you know if you can use green tomatoes for this?

We are finally getting some cooler weather here in Texas and it is raining today. I anticipate a lot of flowering and setting on my tomato plants as a result. Our first cold snap will probably be mid to end November, so I would like to be prepared to make use of all the green tomatoes well beforehand

eta: aaaaaaaaaand just read the linked recipe. Must use very ripe tomatoes. Guess I should start searching for a green tomato wine. I mean, I can only eat so many fried green tomatoes.

While looking for a tomato wine recipe last week I found a green tomato recipe. Do a google search for one. I finally settled on Yopper's recipe and made a few minor modifications. I doubt I have improved on the one she posted.

I racked it off of the gross lees today.