Raspberry Wine From Frozen Fruit

I have started a new batch of raspberry wine, mainly to free up some space in the freezer but also because I like wine!  This will probably taste different to my first batch of raspberry wine (which can be found at this link) for a couple of reasons; the first reason is I didn't use the same technique to make the wine and secondly (and more importantly) the alcohol content will probably be much higher, I'll explain why later.

The method I used for this batch was as follows....

Firstly I defrosted a large bag of berries; they had frozen into a large block and when defrosted a lot of juice had already been released. I didn't weigh the berries but have an idea in my head of how large the bag was, slightly smaller than a bowling ball!

The next step I did was to pour a kettle of boiling water over the berries, approx 1.7 litres, to encourage more juice to be released. Then I poured the mix through a sieve in an attempt to catch any seeds and reduce the amount of pulp going through. With the pulp that was left over I poured the same amount of boiling water again and repeated the last step. Satisfied that I had got a good amount of juice from the berries I discarded the remaining pulp, it had lost most if it's colour anyway.

The pulp still full of juice.

Below is a video of me shaking the juice out!

When the mix had cooled enough I added a teaspoon of pectolase to further help break the fruit down and covered the bowl to leave it overnight. The next day I added the sugar, this is another area that I differed from the previous raspberry wine; instead of measuring the amount of sugar that went in I just measured the gravity and stopped adding sugar when I was happy. It was roughly 1.75kg of sugar but the main point is that the SG was 1.111 which will give a much higher alcohol level if all this is converted. For example, if the final gravity is .99  then alcohol level would be over 16% which I'm more than happy with!

When all the sugar was dissolved I moved the mix into a clean sterilized demijohn, again passing it through a sieve to collect any pulp. Once it was in the demijohn I added a teaspoon of yeast before putting an airlock on. The demijohn was then put to one side in the kitchen with plenty of kitchen roll underneath, just in case it overflowed like my plum wine did!

While I was waiting for this wine to start working I racked the plum wine. It seemed to have stopped bubbling and has been fermenting for about 3 months. There was a think layer of sediment in the bottom of this demijohn, partly from the fermentation and partly because I left a lot of pulp in the juice. This seems to have formed into small balls and sunk to the bottom. Now it is in a fresh demijohn and its clearing nicely. I had a small taste of the wine and am impressed with the flavour so far. Give it some time to mature and it'll hopefully taste great!

The debris in the bottom of  the plum wine.

Once a couple of days had passed the raspberry wine was bubbling away very happily. It has got an amount of pulp that has formed into balls, similar to the plum wine and due to the strong fermentation these are all floating at the top. Luckily there isn't as much as was with the plum wine so haven't had a eruption like before.

The raspberry wine at the front and plum behind

Plum Wine

On the 19/08/11 I started a batch of plum wine. In the background of the first photo there is a few jars of plum jam we also made. By the fact we made over 20 jars of jam and still had enough left to make wine you can get an idea of the amount of plums we collected. We have been back since and it doesn't even look like we've taken any. If this wine is nice then next year I will make a much bigger batch.

The recipe I used for the wine can be found here in full but I will go through what I did. I started off by removing the stones from the plums to make up 6lb of fruit. I then poured over 2 pints of boiling water and crushed the fruit a bit to start releasing the plum juice. Next I added a teaspoon of pectolase when the juice was cool; this helps break the fruit down. I then covered the mixture and left it overnight. The next day I dissolved 3lbs of sugar in 2 pints of boiling water and added that to the fruit mix, which was then left 48 hours. The next step was to add the yeast and put it all into a demijohn. Before putting the juice into the demijohn I strained the mix through a sieve. If I do this recipe again I will use something much finer to strain the liquid from the fruit; this is because a lot of the pulp must have also gone into the demijohn as when I woke up the following morning there was a lot of pulp that had been pushed up by the fermentation over night, the airlock was full and some of the mush was over the kitchen table. I managed to clear this up and there wasn't too much of the mix lost. I did take a gravity reading using my hydrometer so will be able to work out the alcohol level at the end. The reading was 1.08 which will give a final alcohol level between 10 and 15 %, I will now leave the wine a few weeks then rack into another demijohn.

The wine in the demijohn, the pulp at the top is the same as what overflowed after the first night