Raspberry Wine (2020 Version)

With my expansive raspberry patch I am provided with a very ample supply of fruit.  Much more fruit than I had expected when I started the project and a lot more than is needed for the Sour Beers I'd initially planned to use them for each year.  This has driven me to find some new things to do with the ~100 lbs of fruit available to me each year.

Last year I used my excess fruit to make a Raspberry Wine which turned out to be fantastic.  There are many ways to make a raspberry wine - it seems that a lot of these methods don't end up using that much actual raspberry.  I found this article was very helpful for determining how much fruit to use (a lot of it).  I ended up using 40 lbs of fruit which got me 4 gal of very rich raspberry wine.

This year I have a bit more excess fruit (and am running out of storage for new fruit coming in) so I've decided to increase to 50 lbs of raspberry.  I'm sticking with the same amount of sugar as last time (10 lbs) which will likely reduce the ABV somewhat (should still be 10-11% rather than the 13 % the last one got to).

I will give the wine a couple weeks to ferment and then transfer off the fruit pulp and into secondary for 6+ months with oak to mellow.  I'll be using Campden tablets on each transfer to knock the yeast out (so this stays still) and to prevent oxidization.  I plan to back sweeten the final product to make a desert wine (like I did last time).

Recipe Details:

• 52 lb Raspberry
• 10 lbs Sugar
• 1 gal Spring Water
• 2 packets rehydrated Red Star Premier Rouge Wine Yeast
• 4 tsp peptic Enzyme
• Extras:
• 10 Campden Tablet added to fruit initially
• 4 Campden tablets added on transfer to secondary
• 2 oz of white oak toasted at about 350 F and then soaked in Port for over a year

Results:

• OG:
• 1.083 (20.1 brix)
• Volume:
• 5.5 gal
• Post Fermentation FG:
• 0.994
• Back sweetened FG:
• 1.021
• ABV:
• 12.55%

Brewing Notes:

• 6/19/29:
• Split 52 lbs of frozen raspberry between two buckets.  They take up more space than normal frozen so the buckets were almost full

• Added pectic enzyme and first dose of Campden table to the fruit at this point
• Mixed 1 gal of spring water with 10 lbs of sugar and heated until it had dissolved

• Poured sugar mixture into the raspberries
• Let the thaw over night
• 6/20/20:
• Re-hydrated two packages of yeast in separate glasses in room temperature spring water
• The fruit had thawed out by the afternoon and was very much broken down, reduced in size, and with a lot of juice released

• Pitched the yeast
• 6/21/20 - Fermentation was going pretty strong by the next day.  The fruit pulp was pushed to the top.  I periodically spooned it out of the way to allow for off gassing

• 7/1/20 - Fermentation has finished.  I scooped off the fruit pulp on the surface with a mesh strainer to prepare for transfer to secondary.  The pulp weighed 14 lbs - most of the weight of the raspberries is in the juice

• 7/4/20:
• Transferred the wine to a glass carboy for long term aging
• Added 4 crushed campden tablets 
• First used my auto-syphon to draw the wine into secondary but it ended up getting stuck once I got close to the bottom due to there being a fair amount of pulp left
• Ended up using the mesh strainer again to separate out the remaining pulp - was about 5 lbs left
• Added 2 oz of Port soaked Oak

• 5/16/21 - Transferred this into a bucket fermenter to settle out further.  Left a fair amount of solids behind.  Added 3 crushed campden tablets.  Measured the gravity as 0.994 and have 5 gal.  It is boozy and fairly tart.  I'm going to add sugar to it for backswesting which will bring out the fruit notes a bit more.  Going with 3 lbs for this one (used 2.25 lb last time).  I'm going to let this sit for a month before bottling.
• 10/3/21 - Bottled today.  The wine is at 1.021.  Collected 5 gal which netted me 52 12 oz bottles.  No signs of infection on the beer and given almost 5 months with the backsweetening I'd say this is pretty safe to bottle