In short, fruit wine is a kind of homemade wine that is made from any fruit other than grapes. These can include apple, mango, pear, peach and plum wine among other kinds of fruits. This sounds simple, but fruit wine has a history of being unfairly maligned and is well worth trying to make for yourself, especially if you grow your own fruit and find you have too much one year!
Fruit wine almost as long a history as grape wine, mainly stemming from the fact that humans will make wine out of anything and that bumper crops of fruit had to be made into something. Fruit wine isn’t made quite the same way as grape wine though. Grapes are ideal for wine because they have the right levels of sugar and acidity to be fermented without adding anything. Fruit wine on the other hand has to have things added early on, usually the right amount of sugar, in order to make it palatable and it is very easy to screw up the amount of sugar used and turn your wine to syrup.
Fruit wine has a very negative reputation as a result of this; many people, when confronted with the thought of apple or pear wine, don’t think of fine dining and sipping wine but instead backyard, backward wineries that produce things that are only barely drinkable. Even when the fruit wine is good, many people have a hard time believing that you drank a good wine that wasn’t made from grapes! This reputation is only partially deserved; many fruit wines aren’t very good because the quantities of sugar and other things aren’t done right, but many fruits wines are very well done and deserve more respect for it.
If you are interested in making homemade fruit wine, be sure to use a good recipe and follow it carefully. Fruit wine doesn’t lend itself well to experimentation until you get a good feel for how much sugar each kind of fruit will need in order to make it sweet but not too sweet. Fruit wine takes some practice and you should start with apple; apple wine is one of the easiest of the wines to make and is even easier than grape wine, so it’s good to start with.
Homemade fruit wine is an excellent way to use excess fruit from a harvest or to experiment with a far wider range of wines than grapes will yield. You can try out all sorts of fruit bases and find wines that suit your tastes and your needs. Have fun!
Making homemade wine is a great hobby and really fun; if you want to learn how to make homemade wine, then check out our informative and interesting website on making your own wine at http://wwww.secretsofwinemaking.com.