Making Sweet Cherry Wine

Now that I have so many carboys to fill this year, I thought I might try my hand at a new variety of wine.  This is my first attempt at making cherry wine, so I hope that it turns out as well as I hope.  I used the recipe for sweet cherry wine that I found on Jack Keller's wine making page.  That page is a wealth of wine recipes and I haven't had a bad batch yet from following any of them.   This is the ingredient list from this page: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques61.asp

• 8 lbs sweet eating cherries
• 3-1/2 lbs sugar
• 1-1/2 tsp citric acid
• 1/2 tsp tannin
• 1 tsp pectic enzyme
• 7-1/4 pts water
• 1 tsp yeast nutrient
• Port wine yeast

Each recipe is to make a gallon of wine, so I just scale the ingredients up for however large my carboy is.  In this case I wanted to fill a five gallon carboy, so everything was multiplied by five, except the yeast.  I only use one packet of yeast for the whole batch, since it will reproduce enough to process the wine on it's own.   I also ended up using the wine yeast that I had on hand instead of ordering new yeast for port wine.  It may make a difference in the sweetness of the end product, but I can always add more sugar at the end if I need to.  The additives can be ordered from any wine making supplier and I already had enough on hand for this batch of wine, so the only ingredients I ended up buying were the cherries and sugar.

I emailed a local fruit grower in my area to see if I could get a discount for buying a bulk quantity of cherries since I needed 40 pounds for my recipe.  I was rewarded by getting my cherries for $2.50/lb instead of the market price of $4.00/lb, saving me about $60 for this batch of wine.  I also bought the largest bag of sugar that I could from the local grocer and only spent about $12 on 25 lbs of sugar.

Preparing the cherries was the most time consuming part of the process if only because there were so many of them.  Each bag was 1 lb of cherries and I washed and removed the stems from five pounds at a time.  After each round of cherry washing, I dumped them into the primary fermenting bucket and squished them as best I could, taking care to not break any of the pits in the bucket.  Once I worked my way through all of the cherries, I added the other ingredients following the directions on the recipe.  Forty pounds of cherries is a lot when you get them all in one bucket and I didn't even have enough room to add all the water that the recipe called for.

I stirred in the additives and the sugar and even my long handled spoon wasn't long enough to mix things up completely, so I dove in with both arms to ensure that all the sugar was dissolved into the mix.  Finally I added the activated yeast and covered the primary and let it begin the fermentation process for five days.

The next stage of the process involved straining out the cherries and their pits and transferring the liquid to a glass carboy.  It was at this stage that I added the rest of the water that I was unable to fit into the fermenting bucket in the first step.  I wanted to make sure that I had a full batch of wine for all the effort I was putting into it, so I just topped off the liquid until the carboy was full.  The wine to be was a beautiful deep red color and the aroma of fermented fruit was heavy in the air as I was straining it.

Now the waiting begins.  I will allow this to ferment until I no longer see bubbles rising to the surface in the carboy.  I expect it to take at least a month, but will rack the wine at least once before bottling to be extra sure that the fermentation is finished.  Racking the wine just involves siphoning the wine off the sediment that sinks to the bottom, helping the wine to be as clear as possible.  Each time I rack it I will top it off with more water and add sugar if it seems to need any extra sweetening.  With any luck, I will be drinking my first bottle of cherry wine this fall.