Home Made Apple and Grape Wine

March 7, 2008 | By Larry In Fish and Wild Game Recipes |

Home made apple & grape wine. What a treat. I had a great year in 2007 that produced an overabundance of apples and grapes. I decided to mix the two and the result was a great tasting wine. Although this blog is not about wine making I thought it would fit in nicely with our wild game and fish recipes.If you have never made wine before there are complete wine making kits on the market, that will walk you though the whole process.( Their are also some very good books on Wine Making) These are not all that expensive and will last for years. You can make wine out of almost any fruit. So if it’s a great year for wild berries, apples, chokecherries or wild cherries you can make yourself a fine tasting wine. Equipment you will need:

Wine making Kit or

Hydrometer

Primary Glass secondaryAir lock, Siphon, Nylon fermentation bag, Bottles,Wine capper andBottle corks.

One thing nice about making this wine if you cant get to it right away, you can freeze the fruit to get at it at a later date. All the items in this recipe usually can be purchased from a natural food or co-op store. The recipe I am going to give you makes one gallon. I make 5 gallons at a time so you would increase the ingredients times the number of gallons you want to make.

Apples-4 lbs

Grapes-4 lbs

Water-2 ½ pints

Sugar-2 lbs

Acid blend-1 ½ tsp

Pectic Enzyme-½ tsp

Tannin-¼ tsp

Campden tablet-1 crushed

Yeast-1 pkg one package will work for up to 5 gallons of wine.

Anti-oxidant-add at the time of bottling.

You will want to cut or chop the apples and remove the grapes from their stems. Use only good quality fruit. Load the fruit into your nylon mesh bag.

Mix the sugar with a small amount of the water to dissolve it. Heat it on the stove till it clears. Then add all the ingredients into your primary fermentor except for the yeast and anti-oxidant. After 24 hours add the yeast.

It won’t take long for the yeast to start to work. Stir it daily-I like to squeeze the nylon bag a number of times with my hands to be sure all the juice is being forced out into the liquid. On about the third day start checking the wine with the Hydrometer. You want the S.G. (specific gravity) to be 1.040. Depending on the room temperature this can take about 3 to 7 days. Its time now to transfer the wine into the glass secondary and attach the airlock.

When fermentation is complete you will have a S.G. 1.00. This will take about 3 or 4 weeks. At this point siphon off the wine into a clean container being careful to leave the sediment at the bottom. After cleaning the secondary put the wine back in it and replace the airlock. Its now a waiting game. In a couple of months the wine will be clear, you can then bottle it or recycle it again for more clarity. The older it gets- the better it gets!