I've got cherries and gooseberries - help me experiment

I've just picked about 2kg of cherries this evening from a tree on my street. I think they're St Lucie cherries. They're quite tart, and there are loads more ready to be picked, so I'm happy to experiment.

I also have about 300 grams of gooseberries in the freezer. I have two little gooseberry bushes, but they're not very productive so there won't be a load more this season.

I've never made anything with cherries or goosberries yet - I've only made some basic dry ciders using desert and cooking apples. I'd like to do something simple as an experiment with my cherries and gooseberries.

Option 1 - Mash up the cherries, skins and seeds, throw into a demijohn, add water, pitch a wine or an ale yeast and walk away.

Option 2 - as above but also including gooseberries

Option 3 - I have four gallons of lacklustre cider at various stages of fermentation (ranging from 2 to 3 months since pitching yeast). Take one gallon, divide it up between three demijohns, add cherries, gooseberries and ale yeast and referment.

Any suggestions?

 

Here's a couple of cherry wine recipes:
http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques61.asp
There are gooseberry wine recipes on the same site.

You might consider a cherry or gooseberry melomel, cherry makes a fine melomel when balanced with the honey. Adding the fruit(s) to your cider sounds good too, never had a gooseberry cider, but it sounds good to me.
Regards, GF.

 

I have just been given the entire harvest of a tart cherry tree, provided I am willing to harvest them. Duh!, of course I will harvest them. My experience with frozen cherry concentrates taught me to keep an eye on the pH, as they tend to be too acidic for happy yeast in strongly flavored cherry ciders. I have not yet pH'd my fresh cherries and it may not become an issue making a fresh batch of hard cider into apple/cherryjack.

 

My vote: option 3: Secondary some cider on cherries. I made a batch with sour cherries, everyone so far has really liked that one.

I used 1lb per gallon for about 1 month.

Cheers!