Peach Wine with no sugar added?

[PhoenixGoesNatural]

Hubby and I have never made wine - but he has brewed his own beer. We have some loaded peach trees and would love to try peach winemaking. He insists on adding zero sugar which doesn't sound like a good idea - based on all of the reading I've done. He wants to get started on this yesterday, so I'm soliciting all the helpful comments I can get. Thank you all for being here for support!

 

[MaxStout]

I don't have any direct experience with making peach wine, but this thread might help.

 

[PhoenixGoesNatural]

MaxStout thank you! I'm already feeling better after reading what's in there!

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi PhoenixGoesNatural - and welcome. If you have or can borrow a refractometer you can determine the sugar content of your peaches. My guess is that they will have a gravity of about 1.045 - 1.050. That is about 1.25 lbs of sugar in every gallon of juice (assuming you are pressing the peaches and are not diluting the juice with water). A wine made with 1.25 lbs of sugar will have a potential ABV of about 6% at best. Wines made at 6% ABV do not have a long shelf life: not enough alcohol to inhibit spoilage organisms (when your husband brews beer he likely adds hops and hops inhibit spoilage). Five- six percent ABV is not a session drink but it ain't a wine either. If this was a hard cider you would be drinking this by the pint and not the glass.
You coud add more sugar to increase the SG (specific gravity) at the start. I would always argue that a wine - even a country wine should be pitched when the SG is about 1.090 but adding sugar is not the only way to increase the starting gravity for a wine. Another option is to reduce the ratio of water to sugar in the juice. If you were making jam you would use heat to boil off the water but you are making wine , not jam and another way to remove water is to freeze the peach juice hard and then collect the runnings as you allow this frozen juice to gently thaw. If you collect about 1/3 of the total frozen juice as liquid you will have reduced the water content enough to concentrate the sugars and flavor molecules to give you an SG of about 1.090. Effectively doubling the sugar content BUT reducing the total volume of wine... No added sugar but added potential ABV.

 

[PhoenixGoesNatural]

bernardsmith - interesting. Oddly enough, we had already frozen about a gallon of peach flesh before considering peach wine. By the end of the day today we will likely double that amount. Now we're wishing we had a real juice press to do some of the work.

 

[bernardsmith]

I have no sense how much juice you might get from 1 lb of peaches (or a gallon -andt volume is not a good way to measure solids - but if you treat the fruit like a wine maker would treat grapes - crush them to allow the yeast access to the fruit beneath the peel, add pectic enzyme and perhaps some K-meta to inhibit indigenous fermentation you will encourage the fruit to expel its juice. You would pitch the yeast hours after adding the pectic enzyme to a) break down pectins to reduce haze at bottling AND b) to help with juice extraction) Pressing fruit is typically done AFTER active fermentation has ceased. And that juice will have been fermented in the fruit.

With small amounts of fruit ( say, 60 lbs or less) you can press by hand. Remember, pressing is done after fermentation so the fruit is already mushy because of the enzymes you added, and the enzymes the yeast provide to help them get at the sugars. Simply pour the wine and fruit through nylon straining bags (paint shops sell these for a few dollars or you could use real cheese cloth (NOT the cheese cloth sold in supermarkets) and then squeeze the fruit to extract the juice.
If you squeeze by hand you might (might) be able to create a lighter wine from second runnings although you would certainly need to add sugar and water and use the pulp as your source of flavor. Methinks, however, that peaches are flavor thin at the very best of times (flavor thin , not sweetness thin* as far as fruit go) and so second runnings may not result in a flavor rich wine.

* As I wrote previously I suspect that peaches will have an SG of about 1.045 -1.050 which I view as standard for country fruits. Wine grapes are typically at 1.090 - 1.100 but then they are cultivated for their fermentables and not for eating as a table fruit (table grapes are around 1.045)

 

[PhoenixGoesNatural]

bernardsmith - thank you for all your comments. I'm absorbing everything I can.

 

[Raptor99]

To add my $0.02... If you want an ABV suitable for wine you will need to add sugar. You can ferment it all the way dry, so there is virtually no sugar left in the finished product. When I make peach wine I aim for an ABV of 12%.

@bernardsmith When you press fruit after fermentation, do you use a fruit press? What type of press do you use? I assume that you would need to fully sanitize the fruit press and everything that touches the wine? I've been squeezing by hand, but as I work up to larger batches that won't work very well.

 

[bernardsmith]

Raptor99, The only press I have (apart from the press I made for making cheese) is the pressure I can create between my two hands and net bags. Last fall I made wine from fresh grapes for the first time and was able to press by hand what was originally, about 60 lbs or so of grapes. But I did so in small batches and in terms of efficiency it was not great. I got about 3 gallons of a first run and was able to obtain another 3 gallons from second runnings (where you add more water and sugar and basically make a second batch). But the 3 gallons from 60 lbs might have been 4 gallons if I had had a mechanical press. That said, first runnings without applying significant pressure may result in a better quality wine. Mine seems to be doing very nicely, thank you very much, so the loss of efficiency may be a gain in quality... (he said, hopefully).