Can anyone recommend to me a good recipe for a strawberry wine? This is now the time of year when the farm hands from the ranches just outside of town come and stand on my street corner selling crates of strawberries for cheap, so I want to take advantage of this. I actually made a straight strawberry fruit wine before several years ago, but sadly it was ruined by my sister's negligent friends during a party while i was on vacation, so i came back to find it badly spoiled and oxidized

Anyway, I want to try a new recipe this time. I want it to be mostly strawberries, but I'm open to interesting recipes including other fruits as well... I'm thinking I might throw in a few bananas for some extra body. I'm going to buy a few pallets of strawberries in the next few days, but until then I'm just looking for an intriguing recipe to try out.

I welcome any suggestions!

I would use about 6 pounds of strawberries per gallon. I just made a multiberry wine and for 6 gallons I added about 3 pounds of peeled bananas to experiment with the body. About 40% of the banana is peeling so I weighed them after being peeled.

When i've used bananas in my wines before i've always just left the peels on, cut them up, and thown them in the frementor. I'd imagin that a lot of the body charcteristics that have been said to come from the bananas are due to the tannins in the peel itesef and not in the fruit. I could be wrong, but that's how i've thought of it.

Interesting. Never tried the banana peels. Years ago they used to dry the banana peels and smoke them to get high.

Interesting little factoid there, wyo!

^^ Yes, very interesting indeed...

Anyway, after some thinking and calculating, I have put together a recipe that I hope will work for me.

I'm going to make a 5-gallon batch of this Strawberry wine, so I'm going to use:

- 30 lbs strawberries

- Maybe about 1-5 lbs of blueberries (not sure about this addition, what do you think?)

- 2 lbs of sugar AND 3 lbs of honey (total 5 lbs sugar) to aim for around 10% P.A. (should this be enough?)

- Juice of 3-6 lemons to bring acid level to about a pH of 3.5 (I could also add citric acid)

- 3-5 chopped bananas (with peels) to add body and some banana flavor

- 1 tsp yeast nutrient

- 1/2 tsp Pectic enzyme

- 5/8 tsp tannin powder

- And 1.66g Potassium metabisulfite which would bring 5-gallons of wine at a pH of 3.5 to an SO2 level of 50 ppm. (I can adjust this as needed).


That's my proposed recipe as I have just written it. I'm not sure if I needed to scale the yeast nutrient and the pectic enzymes, so I'm worried if those amounts are low or not. Also, I calculated the amount of sulfite to use based on getting 50ppm free SO2; would that amount be appropriate for my recipe? I will be testing and adjusting the acid and sulfite as I'm making it up, so I can adjust that accordingly to however much free SO2 I want to aim for.

This is what I'm looking at, so I will probably make this up over the weekend or sometime next week. Please make any comments to or suggestions on my recipe!!!

I looked back through my wine journal. On 3/4/08 I made a strawberry wine.

24 pounds frozen strawberries. Thawed and through a blender. I put the blended strawberries into a huge net bag. I have a large one. You could use two Home Depot paint strainer bags. (large ones)
4 gallons water.
29 cups sugar. (Sg 1.092)
3 teaspoons pectic enzyme
1 1/2 teaspoons tannin
5 teaspoons yeast nutrient.
9 teaspoons acid blend (these strawberries were very low acid. I set acid at .60%)
5 crushed campden tablets

On 3/5/08 I added 3 teaspoons yeast energizer, stirred, then added premier cuve' yeast.

When I racked to the secondary on 3/8/08 I had about 7 gallons of wine.
On 3/25/08 I racked again. It didn't seem to be clearing fast enough for me so I added 4 teaspoons bentonite as I racked. (made a slurry of bentonite)
On 5/22/08 the alcohol was 15%
On 7/23/08 racked and I added 2 1/2 teaspoons potassium sorbate, 5 crushed campden tablets and 2 cups oak chips.
On 8/21/08 I filtered through a #2 filter and bottled. I got 23 bottles. The color was a little washed out, more orange than red but very good flavor. It seemed like the oak absorbed a lot of the red color but it turned out to be a great wine.

Last, I added campden several times.
5 campden tablets on 3/4/08
1 campden tablet on 5/22/08
5 campden tablets on 7/23/08

Started it today!

Acquired 22.5 pounds of fresh strawberries. I stemmed and chopped them, then added them to straining bag.

Added two chopped bananas to the strawberries (with the peels
).

Boiled 4 gallons of water to which I added: 5.2 lbs clover honey, 1 lb sucrose (may add more depending on O.G. reading tomorrow), 5 tsp. DAP yeast nutrient, 2 tsp Calcium Citrate, almost 1 tsp. grape tannin, and juice of four lemons. Boiled all this for a few minutes and then poured over fruit in frementor.

Tomorrow, when temperature is down, I will add 2 tsp. pectic enzyme. I will also add a couple grams of potassium metabisulfite. I will measure the specific gravity and the pH, so I can adjust each of those as needed before pitching the yeast.

About how long should I wait for the pectic enzyme to work before pitching the yeast?

All looks good so far!

I did notice one large typo mistake in my strawberry wine recipe. That should be 2 1/2 teaspoons of potassium sorbate. Yipes!!! I accidently typed in cup instead of teaspoon. I'll go back and ammend it.

I usually add my pectic enzyme after I get everything all mixed. About 24 to 30 hours before I add my yeast and energizer.

Why did you add several campden tablets at several times? I've always added a little in the beginning when the must is cool, and then a little later durring storage. I would think that the sorbate you used should have been enough to stabilize? Why add extra sulfite so many times?

Potassium sorbate will not stop fermentation. It will prevent fermentation from starting. When adding potassium sorbate always add campden first. I add campden approx half strength every racking or full strength every other racking. If you add potassium sorbate without adding campden your wine can taste like dead fish, or a germanium flavor. If you make a dry wine you really can skip the potassium sorbate.

Experience has been my best teacher. I have tried to skimp on campden when racking and have had a couple of batches of wine (5 gallons) oxidize. Putting 8 months into a wine and having it oxidize is discouraging. I have yet to over metabisulphate a wine so I tend to use campden more rather than less.

With 5 lbs of honey and 5 lbs of sucrose, my original gravity was still lower than I needed hovering around 1.050. I added about 4 lbs (8 cups) of sucrose to the batch to bring it up to a specific gravity of 1.080.
I pitched two packets of Montrachet yeast.

A Specific gravity of 1.080 should give you approx 10.9% alcohol. I have found it seems to drift upward, especially when using fruit so probably in the area of 11.5%. I suspect all of the sugar in the pieces and chunks doesn't get measured until it starts breaking down.

Maybe I'm wrong for this but I put my strawberries(frozen) in almost boiling water and sort of break them up a little.I let them stay in there for maybe 15-min. That seems to keep the rich RED color.Before it would end up more orange colored.