semi-sweet strawberry wine

[conpewter]

My wife would like to make wine (yay!) but I'm a bit lost on a recipe to help her out. I've seen a couple strawberry wine recipes on here but I'm not sure about how sweet they turn out. I've pretty much failed myself on making a semi-sweet wine (in the 3 attempts I've made) so I would appreciate it if anyone has a recipe/process that we could follow.

 

[pumpkinman2012]

The best way to make a semi-sweet strawberry wine is to ferment the wine to dry, .990 and back sweeten to your preferred sweetness with a simple syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water, but you can make 3 or 4 to 1 as well).
You'll need a hydrometer to take the starting gravity level and to know when your wine is finished fermenting.
Once it has finished fermenting, rack into a clean carboy adding Potassium Metabisulfite (Meta) that has been diluted.
I highly recommend letting it age at least 6 months, during that time the wine will clear as the lees\sediment drop, you may need to rack the wine off the lees\sediment a couple of times.
After the wine has aged approx 6 months, fine\clarify it and filter it for that beautiful polished look (filtering isn't necessary).
Rack again.
At this point you'll need to stabilize your wine with Potassium Sorbate (Sorbate) and Potassium Metabisulfite (Meta) and mix gently so it stays in suspension.
Depending on the volume of wine, you can start to back sweeten by adding a half cup of simple syrup, mixing into the wine real well and tasting a small sample of the wine after 15 mins.
I'll continue to add the simple syrup until I reach the level of sweetness that we enjoy, I highly recommend that you let your wife taste every sample as well, it's very important that she likes the wine, my wife is my taste tester.
This is a real easy wine to make and real easy to back sweeten, just remember, you'll want to stop adding the simple syrup when it is almost to the level that you would like, the syrup will actually continue to integrate into the wine.

I hope that this helps, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.

 

[conpewter]

Thank you pumpkinman, sounds like the right way to go.

Do you have a recipe you recommend for the strawberry wine? I've brewed a lot of beer but i'm excited for my wife to get into wine making, i'll be helping her out along the way.

 

[Yooper]

Thank you pumpkinman, sounds like the right way to go.

Do you have a recipe you recommend for the strawberry wine? I've brewed a lot of beer but i'm excited for my wife to get into wine making, i'll be helping her out along the way.

I really like Jack Keller's recipes, although I've never made strawberry wine with one of his recipes. I'm sure they are great, though!

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques5.asp

 

[conpewter]

Thanks Yoop, forwarded it on to her, I'm thinking #3 looks best

 

[bernardsmith]

Always the contrarian, I think Keller's recipes result in diluted flavors and all kinds of other problems. Strawberries are not flavor rich so you want to use as many strawberries as you need to produce the juice you want to ferment. Water is great for beer. It is not usually good in wine.
I would suggest that you aim towards 10 lbs of berries for a gallon. I would further suggest that you freeze them for a few days to damage the cell structure and then when you allow them to thaw you add pectic enzyme and K-meta. The enzyme with the thawing fruit will produce a great deal of juice and if you bag the fruit and ferment in a bucket the yeast will help further break down the fruit.
Strawberry wine has a propensity for the color to fall out (shifts from red to orange and straw) but I think you can fix the color by ensuring the wine is not exposed to light or oxygen (the latter after the active fermentation is over) and by increasing the acidity of the wine (the less acidic the greater the propensity to a loss of color).
As a sidebar, I think heating the juice might also help fix the color but that would also fix the pectins and as you are making wine and not jam I am not sure that heat is a sensible option. I made a strawberry wine a couple of summers ago and the color is still bright red...

 

[theDREWery]

I agree about Jack's strawberry recipe being light on flavor, I use at least 5 lbs per gallon. I also add 1 can Welch's white grape juice concentrate.

Avoid leaving the fruit in primary more than 4-5 days, I've pulled as early as day 3. I let one of my first batches go a full week and got strange woody/grassy flavors from the seeds.

I always make acid additions with citric acid, the stuff from the canning aisle is about 1/4 the price of LHBS. And sweetening with honey, always preferred. Make sure to taste before you bottle, strawberry wine tends to need a little extra tannin added (beyond what is already in Jack's recipe).

 

[conpewter]

Interesting, thank you all
Sounds like this might get expensive on the strawberries. We're planning on buying frozen strawberries to start with as often they are picked ripe and frozen quickly, and strawberries are not in season here yet

 

[pumpkinman2012]

I made a 4 berry wine, Strawberry, Raspberry, BlackBerry and Blueberry, everyone enjoyed it.
Conpewter - Yes these fruit wines can get real expensive, the ratio of fruit to water is anywhere between 3 lbs per gallon up to 5 lbs per gallon or more, depending on who you ask, obviously, the more fruit the more intense the flavors will be, and at that point I would highly recommend a commercial yeast that can bring out real nice characteristics in your wine.
I've attached the recipe, I tried to give you a step by step, I hope the attachment works.

View attachment 6 gallon Berry Blast.pdf

 

[theDREWery]

I think my strawberry at 5 lbs / gal ended up being about $3.50/bottle, roughly the same as boons farm on special last I checked, but with much more intense flavor. That included price of sugar, additives, yeast and corks. I suppose I could drop the price if I went to one of those u-pick farms, but the winemaking bug is year-round and strawberries only come once a year.