What to do with Peach/Banana wine with no body

[lhoffmeyer]

I have a 6 month batch of Peach/Banana wine. It doesn't appear it is going
to have a lot of flavor or body. Suggestions on what I can do to improve
these factors when I go to bottle it?

I have thought about adding glyercin and/or turning it into vinegar?

Thoughts?

TIA,

Lance

 

[bernardsmith]

How much fruit did you use per gallon ? And how much water did you dilute the fruit with? IMO, the secret of making fruit wines with good body and flavor is to use the fruit and dilute the extracted juice with.... more fruit juice - not water.
The solution may be - to make a second batch of peach juice and perhaps freeze that then allow the juice to slowly thaw and catch the first 1/2 or so of the liquid that thaws. That will contain almost all the sugars and flavor molecules. The remainder will be essentially ice water. Toss the icewater and add the concentrated juice to your 6 month old wine and allow this to ferment. This will increase the ABV a little but it will increase the flavor considerably. (alternatively... and I don't know if it is commercially available, look for concentrated peach and banana juice and simply add that to increase the flavor. )...

 

[lhoffmeyer]

I used JK's recipe for Peach/Banana wine. Did one gallon last year and it turned out spectacular. Problem this year was with a combination of late freeze,
hail storm, birds, and worms I did not have a very good peach crop. Not very flavorful. Probably should have used twice as many peaches.
The wine did not come out the beautiful golden color that it did last year.

I did add additional peach juice I found at store. Problem was that it had High Frutose Corn Syrup in it. Haven't really found any information on whether HFCS can be converted to alcohol or not? Was afraid to use very much if it wasn't going to get converted to alcohol (didn't want wine overly sweet).

Maybe I'll boil a bunch of bananas and add that to wine. How much additional time should I let wine sit in carboy (before bottling) after adding additional banana juice? 3 months maybe?

Lance

 

[bernardsmith]

Before you add the bananas you may want to add pectic enzyme to help break down the pectins and so avoid any haze. I think that the yeast may inhibit the action of the enzyme so I would allow the enzymes a day to do their work before adding the fruit to the wine. How long after adding the fruit? I would say until it fully clears.. Could be 3 months .. or it could be another 5 or 6...

I sometimes make wine from jams and some of the jams have high fructose sugars... If any of my wines stall it tends to be those with the HFCS... not sure why , though. I would think that HFCS are simple sugars but perhaps the yeast dis-prefer manufactured sugars compared to naturally occurring sugars...

 

[Yooper]

High fructose corn syrup/sugar is fermentable. I suspect that there aren't enough bananas in this batch if the body is so light- bananas usually give crazy good body, often too much, so adding more bananas would definitely help. I wouldn't' go the glycerine route yet, just in case the body does seem fuller with a bit of aging.