Can you do it?

Brent and Josh make many, many things at Beekman Farm, but as far as I know, wine is not something they’ve yet tackled.  I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s on their mind because Brent just asked me if he could make wine himself and if it can be made from anything other than grapes. The short answer to both is yes, but it begs the question of whether the result is likely to justify the effort and the answer is probably not.

At its most basic, wine is any fermented fruit juice. All it takes for fruit juice to ferment is for yeast to convert the sugar in the juice to alcohol and carbon dioxide, and all it takes for the yeast to do that is the right acidity and temperature. So why is wine made almost exclusively from grapes and not peaches or cherries?

Probably because peaches, cherries, plums, raspberries etc. don’t contain nearly the sugar by weight that grapes or even apples do. The juice will ferment but, unless one adds a good bit of sugar, the resulting alcohol content will not be enough to provide much fun or, more importantly, create a sufficiently stable product that will last more than a few days before turning to vinegar or (more likely) growing mold. If you look online, you can find recipes for fruit wines, but all of them require the addition of large amounts of sugar  and/or fortification with vodka. If you consider that throughout most of history, sugar has been a luxury product, that might explain why wine has been made only from those fruits that naturally contain enough sugar of their own.

However, if one takes the mildly alcoholic results of fermenting cherries or plums or raspberries and distils it…well,  now we’re talking. Eau de Vie is fruit brandy that preserves the aromas of the fruit from which it is made.  It is clear, dry and delicious. Eaux (that’s the plural) de Vie can be made from almost anything but the most common are cherry  (Kirsch) plum (Mirabel or

Eau de Vie

Quetsch), raspberry (Famboise) and pear (Poire), which is my personal favorite. The best come from Alsace — which explains the mixture of French and German in the names — but good examples are made in Germany, Switzerland Slovenia (Slivovitz) and Hungary (Palinka). But Eaux de Vie is not something you can’t make at home. It takes about ten pounds of fruit to make a bottle of eau de vie, it requires special equipment and the government can be quite unpleasant if they find out you are distilling spirits without a license. So back to wine…

There are a few fruits other than grapes that contain enough sugar and acidity to make an acceptable beverage. Apples and pears can both yield hard cider with up to five or six percent of alcohol. This about the same level as beer. In addition, there is enough acidity to make the beverage refreshing.  Hard cider is easy to make at home (I blogged about it some months back), especially if you live in orchard country where you can get unpasteurized cider that will still have indigenous yeast in it. Even with cider, however, unless you have very ripe fruit, it may be necessary to add sugar to obtain a satisfctory results. And I should add that it is quite common, especially in cooler climates where grapes often do not attain full ripeness, to add sugar (usually in the form grape juice that has been concentrated by boiling it down) to ensure adequate alcohol in the final product. This is called chaptalization and it is entirely legal, but the best producers don’t do it and in some places there are labeling laws that distinguish between those wines that are chaptalized and those that are not.

But the real question here was whether one could make wine (real grape wine) at home. The easy answer is yes. After all, isn’t that what all those small, traditional producers in France, Italy and Spain are doing?  Their homes just happen to be in places that are especially well suited to growing wine grapes and they producer much of the world’s great wine and sell it to you and me. If you don’t live in one of those areas, you can still make wine at home. Look online and you will find any number of wine kits that will allow you to make any number of different kinds of wine. The poor grower-producer has to make the same thing year after year (for generations) when you, lucky person can make any kind of wine you want whenever you want… If you still want to do so after reading what comes next.

Your winemaking kit will include grape concentrate. Wine grapes and table grapes are not the same, so don’t think you can make a drinkable wine with Thompson Seedless or Red Flame grapes from the local market. The concentrate will be Cabernet

Basic wine kit

Sauvignon, or Chardonnay or Riesling or another variety of wine grape. If this is a very fancy kit, it may even specify that the grapes were grown in a specific place, like California’s Central Coast or Washington’s Columbia Valley, but don’t imagine that you are getting the same juice that goes into the better wines those regions produce. Nobody is going to make concentrate out of grapes that could be sold for commercial winemaking. This is more like the concentrate that is added to chaptalize an underripe wine.

You will be instructed to dilute the concentrate to its original concentration by adding water  (yes, you too can make wine from water!) and then to add yeast that is also provided in your kit. Although yeast is naturally present on the skins of the grapes in the vineyard, and the most of the best wines are made with those indigenous yeasts, your concentrate will probably have been pasteurized or treated with sulphur to prevent spoilage or spontaneous fermentation. So you will need to reintroduce the yeast.  Naturally occurring yeast can be a tempermental creature, so the yeast provided will be vigorous strain that has been developed in a laboratory to ensure a smooth fermentation. There will also most likely be a “yeast energizer”. This is a mixture of enzymes that will help ensure that the yeast does its work. These are not naturally present in the grapes but, like cake mixes and other “just add water products” and completely unlike nature, your wine kit is designed for dependable and consistent results.

Once you have reconstituted the juice and added your yeast, you will put the whole thing in a dark corner at a constant temperature to bubble away until you have wine…Bad wine. It may be inoffensive, but it wont be anything else. It will taste exactly like every other wine made from that particular concentrate and that yeast. It will taste exactly like last year’s wine, and next year’s will be no different.  It may even taste exactly like many commercially available wines which, for all I know, may have been made with exactly the same juice and yeast, which is hardly a recommendation.  You will have made a dead product from dead materials. Forgive me any of you who make wine this way, but what’s the point?

Wine is an agricultural product. It is grown, not made, and any good winemaker will tell you that the better the work in the vineyard, the less needs to be done in the cellar. The real skill is in working the land and managing the vines and the most important decision is how much of the leaf canopy to cut back and when to harvest, etc., depending on that particular year’s growing conditions. If this is done well, there is not much to do in the cellar except to watch, control the temperature and monitor progress. If the vineyard work is not done well, there is nothing a winemaker can do in the cellar to fix it When you make wine from a kit , you are entering halfway through the cellar phase.

But be of good cheer. If you want to experiment with fermentation projects at home, try brewing beer.  That is a process that you can see through from beginning to end and your results can be excellent. If making wine is basically farming, brewing beer is much closer to cooking. It depends on the skillful blending of ingredients and your particular talents and palate as brewer are all-important.  As with wine, there are color-by-numbers kits for making beer that start you off with a can of malt extract, but even with that, you play a more important role You can quickly move beyond them to “mashing” the barley yourself, selecting your preferred varieties of hops and culturing your own yeast. And you have every chance of making something better than much of the beer you can buy.