Homemade Cherry Wine Recipe Guide

Ok, to make this wine we will be using the following. I'm going to be using six pounds of fresh unpeated cherries. I'm going to be using approximately three pounds of sugar. That might change. Check the final recipe at the end of the video for any changes. I'm going to be using a Red Star Premier Classique wine yeast. If you don't have it, use whatever you got. For our tannin substitute, we are using black tea. For our acid blend substitute we're going to be using the juice of half a lemon. Back up here. To bring our measure up to one gallon or four liters, depending on how you're making it, you need fresh water. You need something to do primary fermentation at. Possibly one with a wide mouth opening so you can get your fruit in and out. This particular fermenter does come with its own built-in air lot. which is back there. If not, you will most definitely need your own airlock with bung and something to do secondary from a tissue man, because after about a week in here, it's going to go in the air. You'll need something to determine how much your alcohol level is. So we're looking at having the need for a hydrometer. Straining bags will always be helpful, optional. And before you do anything, you want to make sure that all of your equipment and utensils have been sanitized with your sanitizer of choice. And that's what I'm going to be using to make this wine. Now, probably the easiest way of dealing with these cherries is if you've got a cherry pitter to go ahead and remove the pits from these cherries. But since I don't have one, my option is going to be this way. I'm going to remove all of these little stems. okay with that having been done the next thing we want to do is that you want to give these cherries a good rinse And then we want to put them in the freezer for 24 hours. And the reason for that is that we want to try and break up the cell wall to help extract some more of the juice. So we can move on to the next step. Okay, now that our cherries have come out of the freezer and have thawed out quite sufficiently, the cherries themselves are now quite soft. And one thing about the cherries being soft... I wouldn't say mushy, kind of close to it, but soft is that whereas before we couldn't do anything with the pits and the cherries, now because they are so soft, we can actually just squeeze out the pits and put those aside and move on to the next one. It is a juicy affair so you quite seriously want to do this over the sink if you want to do it this way. If you don't want to do it this way then you just go ahead and start mashing them up with a potato masher which I plan to do anyway but since this is kind of working it's a slow process yeah. But I'm going to do this instead. I was going to macerate the berries, the cherries rather, but this is working. I mean, I'm going to go ahead and do this. So let me finish this up and we'll watch the next step. all right now that that's done we can proceed to the next step we're going to take two quarts of our water and we're going to go ahead and get that in the pot and we want to bring that up to a boil all right Now that our water has come to a boil, let's turn the heat down a little bit. And we can go ahead and add our cherries. If you want to put them in a straining bag first, please feel free. If you want to do it afterwards like I'm going to do it, please feel free. remember the whip that come back up to a simmer all right added our juices come to a simmer let's turn off the heat and while we're at it taking our where should we say potato masher May as well take an opportunity to help mash up some of these berries a bit more to extract a bit more of that juice. And now since our mixture is still nice and hot we're going to go ahead and add four cups of sugar. or two pounds of sugar depending on how you look at it and let's go ahead and incorporate that we might make an adjustment later on in the amount of sugar we want to add depending on our hydrometer reading we won't be able to determine that until after this is cooled down So while we're waiting for this to cool down, we may as well start getting our our tannin substitute mixture and our acid blend mixture together. So we can add that to the pot. Get our tannin substitute mixture going. We just need to add one black tea bag and I'm going to use half a cup of water. No need to be precise. and we want to bring this up to a simmer now is a good time as eddie to go ahead and add our stro like t slash tan and substitute to the mix And a spray till this comes down to room temperature. Now that our cherry juice mixture has come down to room temperature, I'm going to go ahead and transfer that into our fermenter. There are a couple of ways you can do it. You can either just pour it directly into your fermenter. If you've got a wide-bout fermenter. If you've got a narrow-bout fermenter, then you'll be straining out the cherries, of course. I'm going to use a straining bag and strain my cherries that way but they are going to go into the fermenter. This makes it easier for me to keep it clean or do the cleanup afterwards. So we'll go ahead and start this process. Alright, now would also be a good time, as I've done with the other stringing bag, is to give these just a little bit of a preliminary squeeze before tying them up. So we can get an idea of just how much, roughly how much juice we actually have and whether or not we need to top it off with any additional water to bring this up to our... one gallon or four liters and in my particular case I am about just a little bit shy so I'm going to add a little bit more water bring me up to where I need to be And the next thing I want to do, since I've got space to do it, I'm going to take a hydrometer reading. All right, looks like we've got a hydrometer reading of 1.104. Now is as good a time as any to go ahead and get our acid blend substitute incorporated. and let's go ahead and add that to the mix okay with that now done we can go ahead and return our bags of cherries to the mix by wasting any wine and following that we want to put in our cap because what i'm going to do after this is that we now need to convert our juice into wine by adding our yeast now again with your yeast you really don't need a whole package unless you're making five gallons this is a one gallon batch so i'm using quarter of a teaspoon of of yeast kind of sprinkle it around best you can for those of you who want to hydrate your yeast please feel free i've had nothing but success just by sprinkling my yeast around i don't need to stir it up i don't need to shake it up although that wouldn't hurt and what i'm going to do is once i put the cover back on uh for the next three days at least i'm going to come in with a with a good wide spoon that i've sanitized and i'm going to give it a vigorous stir uh to incorporate some more oxygen help the yeast out a bit After three days, I generally don't do it, but they say you can go up to five, but I'm not going to test that theory out. This particular fermenter does have a built-in airlock, which is a little red dot you see. It does have a regular bubbler style airlock that goes with it, but I don't use that anymore because I already know my stuff is fermenting away. So all we need to do now is put a label on it. But one other thing about... what comes next after this after about oh since i'm dealing with fresh fruit after seven days i'm going to take the bags out i'm going to transfer this into our secondary container and start the process of secondary fermentation uh racking every six or eight weeks or so until wine gets clear at which point in time we'll degas it pasta bottle it pasteurize it and uh get it ready for uh for drinking A good time for this wine is going to be about 12 months. All right. It's time to label our creation. What we have here is fresh cherry wine. We started on 6-4 of this date, and our starting gravity reading was 1.104. All right. So there we go. Put that aside. Give it a little bit of love and attention for the next three days. Seven days after we start, we go ahead and rack it secondary. After that, the occasional racks. And after that, the process continues. So if you'd like to see here, please click on that subscribe button you see in the lower right hand corner. It's not there for decorations. It's there for purpose. Make use of it. I appreciate it. Try to get 10,000 hopefully before the end of the year subscribers. But here we go. That's how I make. one gallon batch of fresh cherry wine. Okay in this video we're going to be doing a taste testing of a 12 month old batch of fresh cherry wine that I made. This is the first time that I've made cherry wine using fresh fruit instead of frozen. A couple of observations about that later on but 12 months later it's now time to do a tasting and we're going to get right into this one so we can keep this in under five minutes. Okay a couple of things. One I just bottled this like yesterday. Made a label for it along with the rest of the bottles, but I decided since I'm going to be doing this bottle tomorrow, or rather the day after, why put it on knowing full well that I'm going to have to scrape it off after it's done. Same thing with not putting in a cork. You need a cork. No. So this will be a very quick step one. Fresh cherry wine, born 6-20-21. AVB of 14.44%. Got up a little, got up kind of high up there. And of course it's in. pasteurized, which is my way of stabilizing my wine since I don't use sulfites. The wine was clear. I mean, yeah, it's clear. So there was like no sediment. After 12 months of sitting in a carport, I mean, a couple of rackings and basically it's going to clear up. So that was all I'm going to say about that. We're going to get right into this one. So I'm going to really try and keep this under five minutes. It's been back sweetened, to be sure. which is what I do with most of my wines. I don't really like them dry. Before even tasting this one, cherry wines, I mean, it's kind of hard not to go wrong with a cherry wine. I've made a couple of batches of frozen cherry wines, and before I even taste this one, I'll just simply say this. The process that I used, yeah, I used fresh cherries. I didn't have a cherry pitter, you know, to pit the cherries out. And I had like a one-day delay while I was trying to finish up another project. So I put the cherries in the freezer, which had the unintended benefit of, once they thawed out, of being able to simply squeeze out the pits without having to use any other artificial means to do so. But having done that, it was kind of like, well, if I bought frozen cherries that were already pitted, what's the difference? Actually, there was not. So next time I make a batch, it'll probably be frozen jerrys. It's a lot quicker and easier. That having been said, I'm going to go ahead and give it a quick taste. Even though I tasted it yesterday on a batch, so it was pretty good. And let's see what a day has done. That's good. It's smooth, it's not harsh at all. You're not really getting any of that, even though it's at 14.44%. You're not really getting a lot of alcohol at all. I would say the acidity is right. I don't think I'll be making any changes there to the original recipe. Again. having the benefit of these two lights. Yeah, it went very, very clear. I was really happy about that. I don't remember if I used pectin enzyme. I'm kind of hoping I didn't because I'm still trying to get away from that, trying to keep things as natural as possible or more to the point, as grocery store friendly as possible. I did do my last video was at one on the difference between pasteurized and unpasteurized meads. I did one bottle of four, three bottles pasteurized, you know, four bottles pasteurized, one bottle unpasteurized. They had a taste testing of the difference between that. And the pasteurization on the meads turns out that the pasteurized version was a bit softer. The unpasteurized version was a bit crisper in taste. But again, if you're not using sulfites and you need a way of stabilizing the wine unless you're planning on drinking it that day or shortly thereafter, Pasture's Ace still works. The trade-off was my payout. Again, very short video. Fresh cherry wine. I don't have a bottle of the frozen cherry wine to compare it up against, but what you've got are fresh cherries and these were dark sweet cherries. Really? Okay. If you've got a fresh cherries, give it a try. I think the next time I try this, I'll be using the real red cherries. This is my son. He's blowing up my phone. He's telling me that they finally found out what child was going to be, boy or girl. So, yeah, I'm going to be a granddad. God, I now feel old. That being aside, again, final thoughts. This is good. No offense and buts about it. Yeah, cherry wines are definitely on my to make again agenda. I think I've got a two gallon batch of cherry wine somewhere in the works. Cherry mead is also a very good one. Give that a try if you haven't but again short video. This is a winner. Definitely will be making this one again. That being said click on the subscribe and notify buttons and I will see you in the next video.

Ok, to make this wine we will be using the following. I'm going to be using six pounds of fresh unpeated cherries. I'm going to be using approximately three pounds of sugar.

That might change. Check the final recipe at the end of the video for any changes. I'm going to be using a Red Star Premier Classique wine yeast. If you don't have it, use whatever you got. For our tannin substitute, we are using black tea.

For our acid blend substitute we're going to be using the juice of half a lemon. Back up here. To bring our measure up to one gallon or four liters, depending on how you're making it, you need fresh water.

You need something to do primary fermentation at. Possibly one with a wide mouth opening so you can get your fruit in and out. This particular fermenter does come with its own built-in air lot. which is back there. If not, you will most definitely need your own airlock with bung and something to do secondary from a tissue man, because after about a week in here, it's going to go in the air.

You'll need something to determine how much your alcohol level is. So we're looking at having the need for a hydrometer. Straining bags will always be helpful, optional.

And before you do anything, you want to make sure that all of your equipment and utensils have been sanitized with your sanitizer of choice. And that's what I'm going to be using to make this wine. Now, probably the easiest way of dealing with these cherries is if you've got a cherry pitter to go ahead and remove the pits from these cherries. But since I don't have one, my option is going to be this way. I'm going to remove all of these little stems.

okay with that having been done the next thing we want to do is that you want to give these cherries a good rinse And then we want to put them in the freezer for 24 hours. And the reason for that is that we want to try and break up the cell wall to help extract some more of the juice. So we can move on to the next step. Okay, now that our cherries have come out of the freezer and have thawed out quite sufficiently, the cherries themselves are now quite soft.

And one thing about the cherries being soft... I wouldn't say mushy, kind of close to it, but soft is that whereas before we couldn't do anything with the pits and the cherries, now because they are so soft, we can actually just squeeze out the pits and put those aside and move on to the next one. It is a juicy affair so you quite seriously want to do this over the sink if you want to do it this way.

If you don't want to do it this way then you just go ahead and start mashing them up with a potato masher which I plan to do anyway but since this is kind of working it's a slow process yeah. But I'm going to do this instead. I was going to macerate the berries, the cherries rather, but this is working.

I mean, I'm going to go ahead and do this. So let me finish this up and we'll watch the next step. all right now that that's done we can proceed to the next step we're going to take two quarts of our water and we're going to go ahead and get that in the pot and we want to bring that up to a boil all right Now that our water has come to a boil, let's turn the heat down a little bit. And we can go ahead and add our cherries.

If you want to put them in a straining bag first, please feel free. If you want to do it afterwards like I'm going to do it, please feel free. remember the whip that come back up to a simmer all right added our juices come to a simmer let's turn off the heat and while we're at it taking our where should we say potato masher May as well take an opportunity to help mash up some of these berries a bit more to extract a bit more of that juice.

And now since our mixture is still nice and hot we're going to go ahead and add four cups of sugar. or two pounds of sugar depending on how you look at it and let's go ahead and incorporate that we might make an adjustment later on in the amount of sugar we want to add depending on our hydrometer reading we won't be able to determine that until after this is cooled down So while we're waiting for this to cool down, we may as well start getting our our tannin substitute mixture and our acid blend mixture together. So we can add that to the pot. Get our tannin substitute mixture going. We just need to add one black tea bag and I'm going to use half a cup of water.

No need to be precise. and we want to bring this up to a simmer now is a good time as eddie to go ahead and add our stro like t slash tan and substitute to the mix And a spray till this comes down to room temperature. Now that our cherry juice mixture has come down to room temperature, I'm going to go ahead and transfer that into our fermenter. There are a couple of ways you can do it. You can either just pour it directly into your fermenter.

If you've got a wide-bout fermenter. If you've got a narrow-bout fermenter, then you'll be straining out the cherries, of course. I'm going to use a straining bag and strain my cherries that way but they are going to go into the fermenter. This makes it easier for me to keep it clean or do the cleanup afterwards.

So we'll go ahead and start this process. Alright, now would also be a good time, as I've done with the other stringing bag, is to give these just a little bit of a preliminary squeeze before tying them up. So we can get an idea of just how much, roughly how much juice we actually have and whether or not we need to top it off with any additional water to bring this up to our... one gallon or four liters and in my particular case I am about just a little bit shy so I'm going to add a little bit more water bring me up to where I need to be And the next thing I want to do, since I've got space to do it, I'm going to take a hydrometer reading.

All right, looks like we've got a hydrometer reading of 1.104. Now is as good a time as any to go ahead and get our acid blend substitute incorporated. and let's go ahead and add that to the mix okay with that now done we can go ahead and return our bags of cherries to the mix by wasting any wine and following that we want to put in our cap because what i'm going to do after this is that we now need to convert our juice into wine by adding our yeast now again with your yeast you really don't need a whole package unless you're making five gallons this is a one gallon batch so i'm using quarter of a teaspoon of of yeast kind of sprinkle it around best you can for those of you who want to hydrate your yeast please feel free i've had nothing but success just by sprinkling my yeast around i don't need to stir it up i don't need to shake it up although that wouldn't hurt and what i'm going to do is once i put the cover back on uh for the next three days at least i'm going to come in with a with a good wide spoon that i've sanitized and i'm going to give it a vigorous stir uh to incorporate some more oxygen help the yeast out a bit After three days, I generally don't do it, but they say you can go up to five, but I'm not going to test that theory out. This particular fermenter does have a built-in airlock, which is a little red dot you see.

It does have a regular bubbler style airlock that goes with it, but I don't use that anymore because I already know my stuff is fermenting away. So all we need to do now is put a label on it. But one other thing about...

what comes next after this after about oh since i'm dealing with fresh fruit after seven days i'm going to take the bags out i'm going to transfer this into our secondary container and start the process of secondary fermentation uh racking every six or eight weeks or so until wine gets clear at which point in time we'll degas it pasta bottle it pasteurize it and uh get it ready for uh for drinking A good time for this wine is going to be about 12 months. All right. It's time to label our creation.

What we have here is fresh cherry wine. We started on 6-4 of this date, and our starting gravity reading was 1.104. All right. So there we go. Put that aside.

Give it a little bit of love and attention for the next three days. Seven days after we start, we go ahead and rack it secondary. After that, the occasional racks.

And after that, the process continues. So if you'd like to see here, please click on that subscribe button you see in the lower right hand corner. It's not there for decorations.

It's there for purpose. Make use of it. I appreciate it. Try to get 10,000 hopefully before the end of the year subscribers.

But here we go. That's how I make. one gallon batch of fresh cherry wine. Okay in this video we're going to be doing a taste testing of a 12 month old batch of fresh cherry wine that I made.

This is the first time that I've made cherry wine using fresh fruit instead of frozen. A couple of observations about that later on but 12 months later it's now time to do a tasting and we're going to get right into this one so we can keep this in under five minutes. Okay a couple of things.

One I just bottled this like yesterday. Made a label for it along with the rest of the bottles, but I decided since I'm going to be doing this bottle tomorrow, or rather the day after, why put it on knowing full well that I'm going to have to scrape it off after it's done. Same thing with not putting in a cork. You need a cork. No.

So this will be a very quick step one. Fresh cherry wine, born 6-20-21. AVB of 14.44%. Got up a little, got up kind of high up there. And of course it's in.

pasteurized, which is my way of stabilizing my wine since I don't use sulfites. The wine was clear. I mean, yeah, it's clear.

So there was like no sediment. After 12 months of sitting in a carport, I mean, a couple of rackings and basically it's going to clear up. So that was all I'm going to say about that. We're going to get right into this one.

So I'm going to really try and keep this under five minutes. It's been back sweetened, to be sure. which is what I do with most of my wines. I don't really like them dry.

Before even tasting this one, cherry wines, I mean, it's kind of hard not to go wrong with a cherry wine. I've made a couple of batches of frozen cherry wines, and before I even taste this one, I'll just simply say this. The process that I used, yeah, I used fresh cherries.

I didn't have a cherry pitter, you know, to pit the cherries out. And I had like a one-day delay while I was trying to finish up another project. So I put the cherries in the freezer, which had the unintended benefit of, once they thawed out, of being able to simply squeeze out the pits without having to use any other artificial means to do so.

But having done that, it was kind of like, well, if I bought frozen cherries that were already pitted, what's the difference? Actually, there was not. So next time I make a batch, it'll probably be frozen jerrys. It's a lot quicker and easier.

That having been said, I'm going to go ahead and give it a quick taste. Even though I tasted it yesterday on a batch, so it was pretty good. And let's see what a day has done.

That's good. It's smooth, it's not harsh at all. You're not really getting any of that, even though it's at 14.44%.

You're not really getting a lot of alcohol at all. I would say the acidity is right. I don't think I'll be making any changes there to the original recipe.

Again. having the benefit of these two lights. Yeah, it went very, very clear.

I was really happy about that. I don't remember if I used pectin enzyme. I'm kind of hoping I didn't because I'm still trying to get away from that, trying to keep things as natural as possible or more to the point, as grocery store friendly as possible. I did do my last video was at one on the difference between pasteurized and unpasteurized meads. I did one bottle of four, three bottles pasteurized, you know, four bottles pasteurized, one bottle unpasteurized.

They had a taste testing of the difference between that. And the pasteurization on the meads turns out that the pasteurized version was a bit softer. The unpasteurized version was a bit crisper in taste. But again, if you're not using sulfites and you need a way of stabilizing the wine unless you're planning on drinking it that day or shortly thereafter, Pasture's Ace still works.

The trade-off was my payout. Again, very short video. Fresh cherry wine.

I don't have a bottle of the frozen cherry wine to compare it up against, but what you've got are fresh cherries and these were dark sweet cherries. Really? Okay. If you've got a fresh cherries, give it a try.

I think the next time I try this, I'll be using the real red cherries. This is my son. He's blowing up my phone.

He's telling me that they finally found out what child was going to be, boy or girl. So, yeah, I'm going to be a granddad. God, I now feel old.

That being aside, again, final thoughts. This is good. No offense and buts about it. Yeah, cherry wines are definitely on my to make again agenda. I think I've got a two gallon batch of cherry wine somewhere in the works.

Cherry mead is also a very good one. Give that a try if you haven't but again short video. This is a winner.

Definitely will be making this one again. That being said click on the subscribe and notify buttons and I will see you in the next video.

Transcript for:Homemade Cherry Wine Recipe Guide

Transcript for:
Homemade Cherry Wine Recipe Guide