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Winemaking is a fascinating experience. It has more than one millennium. Initially, wine was made from grapes. The overwhelming majority of the wine sold is made from it now.
Grapes are not able to grow everywhere. To make good quality wine, you need technical varieties with high sugar accumulation. Not everyone has the opportunity to plant and grow them. But the usual berries and fruits grow in almost every garden.
Criteria for the suitability of raw materials for winemaking
For the wine to ferment well, the correct percentage of sugar and acid in the wort is important. In practice, almost all berries and fruits allow you to make wine from them at home. But its quality will differ. Most delicious the wine is made from gooseberries, dark and light plums, white and red currants, dark-colored cherries. Sea buckthorn is quite suitable for this.
Unripe berries, as well as overripe ones, will not produce high quality wines.
Wines are subdivided into foaming or sparkling wines, in which there is a lot of carbon dioxide, and still wines: dry, semi-dry and semi-sweet. The amount of sugar in this wine ranges from 0.3 g / l to 8 g / l.
Any still wine can be made from sea buckthorn.
Characteristics of sea buckthorn wine
- Bright yellow or fiery orange.
- Intense taste, slight astringency.
- Has a delicate aroma, in which honey and pineapple notes are clearly felt.
It is best to make dessert-type wines from sea buckthorn with a sufficient sugar content, but other types of wine are obtained from this healthy berry quite worthy.
To make sea buckthorn wine at home, you need to choose and prepare the right berries.
Preparation of raw materials
- We collect the berries completely ripe. Overripe must not be allowed. In overripe berries, the oil content increases. This is good for medicinal use, but it has a negative effect on the taste of the wine. Fatty components envelop the yeast and slow down fermentation.
- Since the fermentation process is due to the yeast contained on the surface of the berries, they cannot be washed. Therefore it is better collect sea buckthorn early morning. The berries washed with dew will be clean. Contaminated berries can be wiped well with a dry cloth.
- We sort out the collected berries to free them from debris. We throw away all the rotten and damaged ones mercilessly. Even one low-quality berry can spoil the whole batch of wine. You can store sea buckthorn for no more than a day, but it is better to use it immediately after collection.
- We knead the berries in a wide basin or saucepan. You can do this with a blender or use a wooden pestle.
There are different options for making sea buckthorn wine. They differ in the amount of added sugar and cooking technology. For novice winemakers, the simplest sea buckthorn wine recipe is suitable, it is easy to prepare it even at home.
Sea buckthorn wine - a simple recipe
It can be prepared from 15 kg of berries, 5 kg of sugar and a liter of water.
The gruel obtained after crushing the berries is filtered. Simple gauze is suitable for this. Add water.After half an hour, the process is repeated to get rid of the remaining thick. Now you need to dissolve sugar in it and put the resulting wort in a glass dish with a wide neck.
In the process of oxidation, salts are formed that can not only spoil wine, but also harm health.
During the first days, the fermentation process proceeds rapidly with the formation of a foam head. It must be removed without fail. The wort is stirred several times a day.
Putting the collected foam in the freezer makes a great nougat.
After 3-4 days, you need to put on a special shutter on the bottle, which will not let oxygen through to the future wine, but will allow the gases to escape.
If there is no such device, an ordinary rubber glove worn around the neck will do.
Holes will have to be punctured in her fingers to release gases. For successful fermentation, the room temperature must be constant and between 17 and 25 degrees. It is impossible to keep future wine in the light. Once a day, the glove is removed for a couple of minutes so that the gases come out faster. After a month, the wine is removed to a cooler room, in which it is necessary to maintain about 15 degrees, but not less than 10. After another month, it is carefully drained from the sediment and bottled. You can already drink such a young wine. But it will taste better after ripening for about 4 months. The temperature for this should be from 6 to 10 degrees Celsius.
Homemade sea buckthorn wine made according to the following recipe has a different ratio of juice, water and sugar. It turns out to be a dessert type and is similar to pineapple liqueur.
Dessert wine from sea buckthorn
For 10 kg of berries you need 4 kg of sugar and 7 liters of water.
The initial stage is no different from the one given in the previous recipe. We mix the strained juice with water and after the second straining we dissolve the sugar in it. After a day of vigorous fermentation, we put gloves on the bottles or put a water seal.
It takes 1 to 2 months to ferment wine in a warm room. To determine the timing of fermentation, we more accurately observe the glove. When the amount of gases decreases, it no longer stands over the bottle, but falls off. If we use a water seal, the signal for the end of fermentation is a decrease in the number of bubbles. There should be no more than 30 of them per minute. In this case, the wort is clarified, and a sediment appears at the bottom of the dishes. We don't need him. Therefore, we carefully decant the wine with a rubber or plastic tube into the bottle. Dessert wine ripens for about 6 months. After that, the prepared drink can be served on the table.
This simple sea buckthorn wine recipe is for those who do not want to wait long for its ripening. It is ready in two months.
Instant sea buckthorn wine
For each kilogram of berries, 1/2 kg of sugar and the same amount of water are required.
Mix the crushed berries with water, strain and dissolve the sugar in the wort. After 24 hours of fermentation, close the neck of the bottle with a glove or a water seal. After the end of fermentation, the wine drained from the lees should mature a little in a dark and cool place. After that you can taste it.
Wines made from sea buckthorn are distinguished not only by their excellent taste, but also retain all the healing properties of this unique berry, since they are not heat-treated.
