Fruit wine with no added sugar

[andrewsbromley]

Hi All,

I'm contemplating making a fruit wine with no added sugar, but I can't seem to find a recipe online.

Here's my thought process: with traditional red wine, the fruit is crushed, yeast is added, fermentation occurs, and then the must is pressed to yield the young wine. Can I follow the same process with other fruit (like blueberries)?

All the recipes I'm seeing crush the fruit but then add water and sugar to the must. I thought, potentially, that using just fruit would yield too much acid in the wine, but a website I found shows that blueberries actually have a higher pH than grapes (3.11-3.33 vs. 2.80 vs. 3.27), though obviously that will vary annually and with local conditions.

Assuming I can hit the Brix I'm looking for (and adjust pH down as necessary), is there a downside to using just pure fruit to produce wine (aside from maybe the cost)?

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Andrew

 

[Yooper]

Sure, you could do that.

Most fruits are more acidic than wine grapes, though. They also tend to have more malic acid (like in apples, for example) which is a harsher tasting acidity so that's why it's diluted with water. Also, it would be hard to find a fruit with enough sugar in it naturally to make a 12% ABV wine.

 

[bernardsmith]

To piggyback on Yooper's post. Most fruit will have enough sugar to provide you with a starting gravity of about 1.045 or so (a brix of about 11.2) and a potential ABV of about 6% - so this is closer to a cider or beer than a wine. That is not a problem unless your goal is perhaps to allow this wine to age but at such a relatively low gravity I am not sure such wines age well.
The other thing is that taste is less dependent on pH than on TA. Fermentability, stability, and oxidation are more dependent on pH (the higher the pH (the less acidic) , relatively speaking, the less stress there is on the yeast but the higher the pH the less stable the color will be and the more likely the wine will oxidize over time) and again, to echo Yooper, berries tend to have malic and citric (neither as strong as tartaric - the key acid in grapes) and you want to look for a balance between acidity and ABV and residual sweetness.

 

[andrewsbromley]

Hey all, thanks for the input!

My initial desire was largely driven by two factors:
1) Produce a fruit wine with the complexity of a grape wine rather than some of the more one-dimensional fruit wines I've typically seen (idea: increasing the amount of fruit in the must would lead to a more robust wine)
2) If you're adding water and sugar to the must, why not replace some of that water/sugar mixture with more fruit (juice).

After contemplating your remarks and digging a bit deeper, it looks like it's just not typically possible to hit the OE desired with fruit alone.

With regard to acids, thanks for pointing out the importance of looking at TA and acid ratios instead of just pH. Given that blueberries predominantly contain citric acid, have you ever run into issues with an excess of citric acid (understanding that adding water + acid blend could help to normalize the ratios here)? After some further reading, it looks like higher levels of citric acid can yield to diacetyl production during fermentation. Have you made any attempt to reduce this conversion by blocking malolactic fermentation?

 

[Yooper]

Hey all, thanks for the input!

My initial desire was largely driven by two factors:
1) Produce a fruit wine with the complexity of a grape wine rather than some of the more one-dimensional fruit wines I've typically seen (idea: increasing the amount of fruit in the must would lead to a more robust wine)
2) If you're adding water and sugar to the must, why not replace some of that water/sugar mixture with more fruit (juice).

After contemplating your remarks and digging a bit deeper, it looks like it's just not typically possible to hit the OE desired with fruit alone.

With regard to acids, thanks for pointing out the importance of looking at TA and acid ratios instead of just pH. Given that blueberries predominantly contain citric acid, have you ever run into issues with an excess of citric acid (understanding that adding water + acid blend could help to normalize the ratios here)? After some further reading, it looks like higher levels of citric acid can yield to diacetyl production during fermentation. Have you made any attempt to reduce this conversion by blocking malolactic fermentation?

No, MLF doesn't work when the acid is predominantly citric acid- it converts malic acid (such as in concord grapes, wine grapes, apples) into the softer tasting and feeling lactic acid.

Blueberry wine is pretty bland to me without "help". It's not something that has a great flavor on its own. Once the sugar ferments out of it, it doesn't have a whole lot of taste. That's with some dilution of course. Also, keep in mind that they are a tough ferment, due to the preservative type compounds in them and if you try to ferment 100% blueberries, you may not get a ferment at all.

 

[madscientist451]

A local wine maker near here, made a straight blueberry wine. He said it was a total PITA to get enough juice and my impression was that the wine was OK, but not worth the $20 a bottle he was charging.
I've made straight cherry wine with fruit I picked myself at a local orchard. It was very time consuming (and expensive) to go out, pick the cherries, remove the pits, let them get soft enough for pressing, press out the juice and then go through all the other steps involved in wine making. The cherry wine was OK, but didn't taste like cherries at all, was very tart and I eventually backsweetened it with cherry syrup and I did drink it all.
So then I realized there's a reason that people make wine from grapes. Its way easier to get a decent wine from grape juice.
Every fall, I buy grapes or buckets of west coast wine grape juice and can make very good wine for about $2-3 a bottle.
I still use local cherries and peaches as an ingredient in beer, last summer's peach ale was especially good.

 

[bernardsmith]

Andrew - Here's a wee trick that will boost flavor and sugar without adding either. What you do is freeze the fruit juice and then allow the frozen juice to gently thaw. Your goal is to collect the juice as it thaws (you are NOT waiting for the entire batch to thaw but you collect the THAWING juice. The first 1/3 of the thawed juice will contain just about all the sugar and flavor (the last 2/3 will be essentially water. So, if you start with say 3 gallons you will have collected about 1 gallon and will have doubled the gravity from about 1.045 to about 1.090 (ie about 12% ABV). There is no free lunch so you lose about 2/3 of the volume...

While this concentrates the flavor, concentrating the flavor does not in and of itself mean that you are making the wine more "complex". Grape wines might have hundreds and hundreds of different flavor molecules dessert fruit (fruit grown for eating) may have a few dozen..The "complexity" of the flavor comes from the enormously complex flavor profile which most table fruit does not have - since they are cultivated for all kinds of reasons OTHER than their flavor profile (shelf life, transportability, early harvesting etc etc etc)

 

[bmd2k1]

Andrew - Here's a wee trick that will boost flavor and sugar without adding either. What you do is freeze the fruit juice and then allow the frozen juice to gently thaw. Your goal is to collect the juice as it thaws (you are NOT waiting for the entire batch to thaw but you collect the THAWING juice. The first 1/3 of the thawed juice will contain just about all the sugar and flavor (the last 2/3 will be essentially water. So, if you start with say 3 gallons you will have collected about 1 gallon and will have doubled the gravity from about 1.045 to about 1.090 (ie about 12% ABV). There is no free lunch so you lose about 2/3 of the volume...

While this concentrates the flavor, concentrating the flavor does not in and of itself mean that you are making the wine more "complex". Grape wines might have hundreds and hundreds of different flavor molecules dessert fruit (fruit grown for eating) may have a few dozen..The "complexity" of the flavor comes from the enormously complex flavor profile which most table fruit does not have - since they are cultivated for all kinds of reasons OTHER than their flavor profile (shelf life, transportability, early harvesting etc etc etc)

Dig the idea of this approach & may try it with my planned spring 1st attempt at a 100% Cherry wine. I've jacked cider with success...just never done it with juice pre-ferment. Great idea to create my own "frozen" cherry concentrate [emoji111]

Cheers [emoji16]

 

[Seamonkey84]

Same way to make a “flavor” pack to sweeten a stabilized batch or to add more flavor to a very bland fruit. I did that with my watermelon wine, froze concentrate the extra must and added it to secondary and let it ferment some more.