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Making Strawberry Wine:

Strawberry wine is in a class of its own.  The very best wine is made from wild strawberries.  You can vary the wine from a dry dinner wine to a sweet dessert wine depending on the amount of sugar you use.  Picking enough wild strawberries too make wine is a real chore because they are so small, but they are worth the picking because they have so much more flavor then cultivated strawberries.

Although you can make strawberry wine from “store bought” berries if you want, but because of the intense taste of the wild berries you will be in for a real treat if you use then instead.  You can make picking the wild berries a real family outing where everybody gets to pick berries.

The biggest difference in making a table wine basically is the amount of strawberries used.  To make five gallons of wine the amount for dessert wine is 25 lbs. and the amount for table wine is 12.5 lbs.  The other ingredients are slightly changed as well.

The ingredients are:

12.5 lbs fresh strawberries                    Table

25 lbs fresh strawberries                                   Dessert

1/8 teaspoon sodium bisulfite                Table

Pectic Enzymes – As directed   Table

5 teaspoons yeast nutrient                     Table / Dessert

1 teaspoon of wine tannin                      Table

8 teaspoons acid blend                         Table

(60% tartaric acid)       

8 lbs. sugar                                           Table   

12 lbs. sugar                                                     Dessert

1 package Champaign Yeast                 Both

These are two extremes in making strawberry wine, and your own recipe can vary somewhat as to ingredients.  The more strawberries used the less wine tannin is required.  You can also mix store bought strawberries and wild strawberries.  The more wild ones you use the more intense the flavor becomes.

Rinse the fresh strawberries lightly allow to drain.  After they have drained hull the berries and cut off any parts that are green.  Discard any berries that are showing spoilage.  In a large bowl chop the berries.  If you are using frozen berries they should be mashed at this step.

Don’t add the yeast, yeast nutrient at this time.  You can add the Pectic enzyme though. Even though at this point you only have about two gallons add the Pectic enzyme as though you have the full five gallons.  Use 1 ¼ teaspoon per gallon, and for 5 gallons not two.  This allows the Pectic enzyme to be broken down faster then it normally would.

For your primary fermenter you can use a 5 gallon stoneware crock or a 5 gallon food grade plastic container.  Put the cut up or mashed strawberries into this container and cover with just enough water to barely cover the berries.  If the recipe calls for it this is where you add the acid blend, sodium bisulfite and the wine tannin.

Allow the mixture to stand in the fermenter for 24 hours stirring it once in a while.  During this time the mixture will change from thick and pasty to a thinner mixture with a sort of candied look.  It is also during this period that the sodium bisulfate is sterilizing the mixture.

After the first 24 hours has passed you can add the rest of the water to make up the five gallons, add the sugar, yeast nutrient and yeast.  Cover the container with a cloth to keep wild yeast out of the wine and continue allowing it to ferment for another week.  Then you rack (siphon) it into another container being careful to keep as much of the mashed berries and other sediment in the first container as possible.

Your second container should be a glass or plastic carboy that you can put an airlock on to the container.  Then allow this to sit until the remaining sediments settle to the bottom in an additional 1 to 2 weeks.  Now your wine is completely finished.  If you like you can add more sugar to taste.  You can use either table sugar for this step, or honey.

The last step is too rack the wine into bottles, and even though it is now done, a little more aging improves the taste.