Back in July, Skeena cherries were plump and ready to be eaten. I picked about 90kg of cherries from a U-Pick farm, turning 10kg of it into cherry liqueur and the rest into an all-juice wine.
Once the cherries were picked, I washed, destoned, and crammed all 80kg of them into a breville juicer (which I wouldn't recommend doing as cherry chunks flew all over my kitchen). I got about 25L of juice with plenty of pulp which I then stuck into a beer kettle to pasteurize for about 10 minutes. The juice was then strained and I took a SG reading of 1.062. The juice wasn't quite as high a gravity as I wanted, so I put in 2L of honey bringing it to SG 1.071.
I left the wine to ferment in the primary fermenter for 3 weeks, where it was then racked into a 23L carboy. There was A LOT of sludge sitting at the bottom, so I racked the sludge into a smaller carboy to allow it to settle out a little extra juice.
Right now it has been fermenting for 7 weeks and is still sitting in the glass carboys. The current gravity reading is 0.999. I am thinking that I am going to rack it again and let it sit for another month.
OK Cherry Wine
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- ArcherFish
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- still_stirrin
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Re: OK Cherry Wine
Very nice color. It looks very inviting. Have you sampled it? Is it tart?
Good job.
ss
Good job.
ss
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- ArcherFish
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Re: OK Cherry Wine
I sampled it. It is a bit tart with a chalky aftertaste. I anticipate that when I filter it, the chalkiness will disappear.
- cranky
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Re: OK Cherry Wine
I get that white chalky stuff on top sometimes, especially if there is a lot of head space, I try to top it up so there is minimal head space once it is close to finished. I believe someone once told me it is actually a yeast bloom of some kind but I'm not really sure, I don't believe it has ever harmed my wine.
Re: OK Cherry Wine
How did this turn out in the end?
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Re: OK Cherry Wine
One of the best mistakes we made is cherry wine. It did not taste as we expected and forgot about it for a few years. Much later we found the bottles and oh my it had improved A LOT. So, forget about it and hopefully, you will have a nice surprise too.
Cheers,
Cheers,