Home made country wine making and recipes - growing and caring for vines and grapes

An alternative, if the tannin is a problem, is one cup of very strong, cooled tea (no milk or sugar added)

METHOD

They need to be chopped into small pieces and put in a pan with 3 pints of water.

At this point, strain the liquid into your primary fermenter, but DO NOT PRESS the carrots.

Put the carrot pieces back into your pot and add another 3 pints of water and bring to the boil again, boiling for a further 5 minutes.

Strain the liquid into your primary fermenter, but again DO NOT PRESS the carrots.

By now the carrots will have given up their goodness into the strained liquid, so dispose of the remaining pulp.

While the liquid is still hot, chop the raisins and add them to the fermenter. Add all the other ingredients except the yeast and allow it to sit (covered over with a cloth - a tee shirt or tea towel works wonders here) overnight to keep the bugs out.

The following day you need to make up the volume of the liquid to a gallon with room temperature water that has been previously boiled.

Check the specific gravity (SG) ---- it should be around 1.090. If it is a little lower, then simply add a further two ounces of sugar, stir it in, then check the SG again.

If necessary add more sugar to bring the SG up to the starting point of 1.090 - but do not worry too much if the volume of the must exceeds one gallon because of the extra sugar added as this will be reduced by the fermentation process - then add the yeast.

Stir daily for three or four days, while the vigorous frothing continues, and it is then time to remove the liquid from the solids, as the orange peel will impart a bitterness if left too long in the must (the liquid).

This is done by either straining through a fine cloth, or simply siphoning it into your secondary fermenter before adding an airlock.

If you like your wines dry, then rack every three or four weeks, until the fermentation has ceased, then bottle your wine. This should be around two to four months later, but it all depends on the temperature the fermentation goes on at. The final SG should be around the 1.000 mark, but slightly less is OK.

For a sweeter wine, simply follow the above procedure, but when the fermentation has ended, just decant around half a pint of the wine and warm it up (do not boil it) and stir in two ounces of sugar, before returning the new sugared solution to the main fermenting vessel.

What this has done is, by heating the half pint, you will have killed off the yeast in that small batch, but when you return the sweetened half pint to the secondary fermenter the live yeast you left inside the fermenter will immediately begin to feed on the new sugar you have just added.

This process can be repeated once the fermentation ceases until the yeast is totally killed off by the alcohol level in the wine, checking each time for the SG to be above 1.000.

Once it reaches this state, and no further fermentation occurs, providing of course you have not let the must get too hot or too cold, that way halting the fermentation early, then you know that adding further sugar will only sweeten the wine so you simply add it to taste.

It's now time to bottle your wine.

But be warned, an over-sweet wine is not to everyones taste, and if you get up to 1.005 or more, then you are likely to be overdoing it a little, especially for a white wine.

Also, you have produced the maximum amount of alcohol possible in your sweet wine, maybe around 14 or 15%, so go steady with it.

CARROT WINE

INGREDIENTS

METHOD

Helping You Make Scrumpuous Wines From Start To Finish