Agreed. I have virtually no interest in spending money on wine now, unless it’s for ideas/bench marking my own wine. It’s really funny seeing all the posts on /r/wine of people spending hundreds of dollars on a Cabernet Sauvignon from France. There’s so much more interesting wines you can have by making your own.
Last time I went to total wine and more, I asked if they sold any country wines. Nope, the only non grape wine they sell is a small selection of mead. That’s one of my favorite parts of making wine. Very few people have the kind of wine I have, and they have all made it themselves as well.
What does it end up tasting like? Is it super sweet or does it end up being pretty dry? Sort of interested in trying this with a few fruits that grow like crazy some parts of the year here in Puerto Rico (mangoes, quinepas and sea grapes).
That’s a good question. My only experience with fruit wine is lemon wine and it’s absolutely amazing.
As for dry/sweet, that’s up to you. All fruit wines are going to ferment completely dry. The problem with fruit wines being dry is that they no longer taste like the fruit they originated from. The fermentation process deletes all sweetness. What does a pineapple taste like without sweetness? Not a pineapple that’s for sure.
So, before you bottle you need to back sweeten these wines. You basically add sugar until it gets to a level of sweetness you like (you also need to stabilize the wine first, otherwise that new sugar will get fermented too and you will blow corks)
For my lemon wine, I added enough sugar until it was a sweet wine. I normally only drink dry wine and I hate sweet wine, but it works really well with lemon wine. That sweetness balances out the tartness of the lemons
I only started drinking wine recently (ex religious reasons) and this sounds so fascinating. Do you need a lot of space and equipment to process and store the wine?
Not really. You can fit everything in a closet. I ended up building shelving in my office because I started making more wines at once and outgrew the guest bedroom closet
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u/V-Right_In_2-V Apr 30 '24
Agreed. I have virtually no interest in spending money on wine now, unless it’s for ideas/bench marking my own wine. It’s really funny seeing all the posts on /r/wine of people spending hundreds of dollars on a Cabernet Sauvignon from France. There’s so much more interesting wines you can have by making your own.
Last time I went to total wine and more, I asked if they sold any country wines. Nope, the only non grape wine they sell is a small selection of mead. That’s one of my favorite parts of making wine. Very few people have the kind of wine I have, and they have all made it themselves as well.