Preparing Fruit And Extracting the Juice for Winemaking

Preparing Fruit for wine, mead and cidermaking isn't as difficult as you might think, and this is a simple method to extract juice from your fruits. The main difference between working with fruit that you have grown or bought rather than foraged is preparation. Whilst small foraged fruits can sometimes be fiddly, apples or strawberries from the shop tend to be quicker and simpler to deal with. 

Buying and Growing Fruit for Winemaking

The good news is you don't have to be concerned about whether the fruit and veg you’ve bought or grown has been in the path of dogs or traffic fumes. But you do need to watch out for insecticides, pesticides, fungicides and other preventative treatments which may have been sprayed on them, unless you grew them organically yourself.

You might think 'buying fruit for making wine sounds expensive'. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. In the height of summer you may find punnets of strawberries drastically reduced in a supermarket at the end of a day. Or you could visit the market late afternoon and find a crate of fruit which is very inexpensively priced to clear. Freegle and Freecycle are great too - you may find someone nearby looking to offload pears, apples and other kinds of fruit as I have many times in the past. Like the pears in the image below.

This is a reader-supported site and I am an Amazon affiliate. That means that if you purchase a product or service using my one of my links, the company compensates me at no cost to you. I only recommend books, products and services I personally use. And here are some beautiful pears I sourced for nothing on Freecycle.

Brewing is a form of preserving, like making jam. So by turning those fruits into wine, cider or mead, you are preventing them from going to waste.

Also keep an eye out for stalls outside people's houses in summer. You will often find surplus rhubarb and apples being sold for pennies.

Wherever you sourced them from, pick through the ingredients and remove any which have started to rot or show signs of mould. Anything you can't use can be composted. Depending on which recipe you are following, some fruits may need to be chopped up. Others, like soft berries, can be added to your brew whole, or they may end up being mashed with a potato masher later in the process. At this stage you could freeze your fruits, which is a good way to break down the cell linings in the fruit enabling more juice to be extracted.

Foraging Fruits for Winemaking

Firstly it is important to stress that you must be absolutely certain what you're collecting is safe to eat. Never take chances with foraged ingredients. If in doubt, leave it behind.

Assuming you are very confident picking blackberries, crab apples, damsons etc, gathering wild ingredients in the hedgerow can be dreamy on a warm sunny afternoon. However those small foraged fruits and flowers can be fiddly to deal with once you get them home. Compared with simply chopping apples or strawberries, pressing crab apples whilst trying to avoid breaking the pips might seem a bit of a task. The effort will be totally worth it.

When picking hedgerow fruit, collect in the cleanest places you can find. Avoid busy roadsides with traffic and pick your fruit higher than a dog's leg can reach, if you get my drift. You can wash fruit quite easily under the tap. I wouldn't do that with foraged flowers, as you risk washing all the fragrance and nectar away, but you can do it with fruits. I still prefer to start with the cleanest fruit I can find.

Blackberries foraged in a pub garden* followed by a game of Uno.

*with the pub staff's permission of course.

When you get home, sort through everything you picked. Remove twigs, leaves or any fruit which has started to go soft, rot or shows signs of mould or insect damage. Some fruits may need to be cut up, others can be used whole, check your recipe. As mentioned before, you could also freeze your fruits.

Extracting Juice for Winemaking

This two-stage process is for preparing juice for a standard glass demijohn or PET demijohn recipe to make 4.5 litres (or 6 standard wine bottles) of wine or mead. It is an ideal method for extracting the juice from berries. Adapt the amount of boiling water you add according to what your recipe says.

You will need:

• 1x straining bag, big enough to take your fruit

• 2x food grade buckets

• A loose fitting lid for one bucket or a clean tea towel

• Pegs to secure your straining bag to the top of the bucket.

Method:

• Sterilise all the equipment you are about to use.

• Put your fruit in the straining bag and tie the top with string. 

• Put the bag inside the first fermentation bucket, with the tied bit hanging over the side so it doesn't fall in. Secure with pegs.

• Pour over boiling water. I look at how much water the recipe suggests I will need, and pour the first third of that amount of water over the fruit.

• Cover the bucket with a loose fitting lid or tea towel and cool.

• Lift the bag out of the bucket and allow the liquid to drip out.

• When it has almost finished dripping, put the bag into the second fermentation bucket.

• Pour over more boiling water (I use the second third of the quantity the recipe asks for), cover the bucket and leave to cool.

• Lift the bag out of the 2nd bucket, allowing the liquid to drip out again.

• Compost what is left of the fruit.

• Mix the two buckets of cooled juice together. 

You have now have your juice and can continue adding sugar, sugar syrup or whatever the recipe asks for. If you need to dissolve sugar in water for your recipe, you have the remaining third in which to do that. 

This all sounds a bit fiddly and time consuming. In reality the steps only take a few minutes and waiting for the juice to cool down is the part that takes the most time.

Want to learn more about Winemaking?

The River Cottage Booze Handbook by John Wright. A thoroughly practical guide to making wine, beer, cider, and infusions at home and one of the first books I bought on the subject. It's a classic!

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