My Homemade Peach Wine recipe is a great way to keep summer flavours available year round.
Homemade wine is easy to make, and super tasty - Here’s everything you need to know about the ingredients, and detailed instructions for making your own sweet peach wine!
Originally posted on November 6, 2020, updated on 7/21/2023.
Weird way to start out a food blog, but the today’s news definitely put me in the mood to share another peach recipe. I - somewhat recently - posted a roundup of Peach Recipes, but have been waiting to post our Fresh Peach Wine recipe.
Today started out with my friend Houston messaging the phrase “Well, slap my peach and call me papa.”... something that still has me laughing, hours later.
I decided to serve it the way I always to - cream cheese topped with the jam - and a friend later pointed out that if it was Philly cream cheese, that was just a whole other layer of appropriate.
I hadn’t even considered it!
Anyway, while peaches aren’t in season, and any wine you put on now won’t even be potable for a few months... it feels like the time to share this recipe.
And hey, if you happen to have anything to celebrate, this also makes a really great sparkling wine! More on that in a bit!
How to Make Peach Wine
If it’s your first time making wine, don't be intimidated! Check out our primer to home brewing:
- Wine Making At Home, Part 1: Why?
- Wine Making at Home, Part 2: Equipment to Get Started
- Wine Making at Home, Part 3: The Brewing Process.
- Wine Making at Home, Part 4: How to Stabilize and Back Sweeten Wine
Just a small handful of entries, and you'll be good to go to get your own wine started!
Peach Wine Ingredients
Aside from fresh fruits, this wine recipe requires only a few ingredients to make - super simple!
Here is some information about those base ingredients that will help you make the best wine!:
Peaches
You can use fresh or frozen peaches to make this wine. There are just a few differences in how to use them, and things to keep in mind:
Fresh Peaches
When using fresh peaches, be sure to use very ripe, flavourful fruit only. More ripe peaches = better peach flavor.
Ideally, use something in-season, as off season fruit never seems to taste as good!
I like to macerate the peaches for several hours before I start making the wine. By that, I mean I’ll pit and chop up the peaches and put them in a large bowl or pot, and stir in the sugar.
Then, I cover and leave it for a while, to let the sugar do its thing.
The sugar draws the natural juices - and flavour! - out from the peaches. I find this gives the best base to the wine, rather than starting with chopped fruit and water.
Frozen Peaches
When using frozen peaches, you can skip the maceration process. Freezing and thawing peaches - or pretty much any fruit - breaks them down in a way that ends up with a result similar to maceration.
Be sure to use a good brand of frozen peaches, and that the peaches are good and flavourful when they thaw. If your peaches don’t have much flavour, neither will your wine.
White Sugar
While sugar is technically optional when making wine, NOT adding any sugar will result in an INCREDIBLY dry peach wine.
When you’re making wine from peaches - much like with any other light coloured, non-grape fruit - you’ll want it to have at least some residual sweetness to it, or it just won’t taste like much.
The sugar helps to bring out the peach flavour - it’s much better as a semi sweet or sweet wine.
To be honest, I wouldn’t even recommend doing it up as a semi-dry wine.
Anyway, sugar is an important part of wine making, and there are a few aspects of sugar to keep in mind:
Type of Sugar
In terms of type of sugar, we prefer to use plain white granulated sugar for this wine.
Sometimes we’ll use brown sugar for part of the sugar content to give it a bit of a deeper flavour - more like a peach cobbler flavour - but generally stick to white sugar.
Feel free to use either type, raw cane sugar, or a mixture of any/all of these.
Note: If you’re going for the brown sugar for some or all of the sugar, try adding a vanilla bean and a cinnamon stick to your boiled mixture, leaving them in through fermentation!)
How to Make Peach Mead
If you’d like to make a mead rather than a wine, you can swap the sugar out for honey. We’ll usually use 4-5 lbs of honey for this.
A couple notes:
- I say “Peach Mead”, as that’s what most people would understand... but mead with fruit is technically called “melomel”.
So, swapping sugar out in favour of honey would give you a peach melomel. The more you know!
- When you’re using honey instead of sugar, you’re going to want to be careful in your choice of honey. Where white sugar is fairly neutral in flavour, honey can be aggressively flavoured.
I recommend picking something lightly coloured and lightly flavoured - a clover or orange blossom honey, for instance.
Something like a wildflower or buckwheat honey is likely to completely overwhelm the flavour from the peaches.
Alcohol Content
Aside from flavour, there’s the matter of alcohol content.
Your wine’s final ABV will vary wildly dependent on a few things: The initial sugar content of the peaches you use, the amount of sugar you add, and what kind of yeast you use (more on that in a bit)
Any amount of sugar will result in a higher alcohol content of your wine, than making the same wine without sugar added.
Sugar - both in the base wine itself, and from the added sugars - is what feeds the yeast, the yeast eats up the sugars and gives off alcohol as the byproduct of that process.
More sugar = more food = more alcohol... to a point, anyway. About that...
Back Sweetening Your Homemade Peach Wine
Sometimes - usually, even - you’ll find that the yeast went a bit too far with their peach wine smorgasbord, and you end up with a final product that’s not as sweet as you’d like it.
... and that’s when it’s a good idea to back sweeten it!
You can read my How to Stabilize and Back Sweeten Wine post for information on how to back sweeten fruit wines with a simple syrup.
Wine Yeast
Because I cook the fruit - rather than use a campden tablets - to kill off any wild yeasts present (As well as being the best way to kill off any bacteria!), you’ll want to use a yeast packet to get fermentation started.
The type of yeast you use will impact the alcohol content of the final product.
Yeast organisms don’t have an *unlimited* capacity to process sugar into alcohol. At some point, the environment they’re living in - the brewing wine - becomes too high in alcohol for the yeast to survive. They die off, the fermentation stops.
Different types of yeast have different tolerances for alcohol in the environment. That is, some yeast will be able to survive higher amounts of alcohol in the wine, so they’ll continue producing it longer than some other types.
Some types of yeast will bring you to something like an 8% ABV, while others will let things run wild until close to 20% ABV.
It’s good to know what you have in mind, when you choose your yeast.
Ask your local homebrew supply shop for recommendations based on what you’re looking for.
In general terms, though:
If you want a sweeter wine with a low-ish ABV - without having to back sweeten it (more on that in a bit) - choose a yeast with a lower tolerance for alcohol.
If you’re looking for a dry wine with a low ABV, choose a yeast with a lower tolerance for alcohol, and less sugar.
If you want a sweet wine with a higher alcohol content, use a bunch of sugar with a high-tolerance yeast... and be prepared to backsweeten it.
If you want a dry wine with a high ABV, use a fair amount of sugar and a high tolerance yeast.
Making Larger Batches of Wine
This recipe makes about a gallon of peach wine, though you can easily scale this wine recipe up.
In fact, there's a function inside the recipe card itself to do the math for you!
One note, though: You don't need to multiply the yeast, but the software doesn't know that. We will use one pouch of yeast for anything from a 1 gallon batch, to 5 gallons, and then 1 pouch for every 5x batches beyond that.
As a related note: The recipe software is definitely geared towards cooking, not wine making. Therefore, you can pretty much ignore all of the info it gives you: The nutritional info is calculated on everything that goes into the wine.
It does not take into account how much sugar will be fermented out, how much volume is lost to racking, the fact that the fruit pulp is removed before the final product, etc.
Everything Else
Rounding out this recipe, you will need:
Spring Water - we use bottled water for its neutral taste
Golden Raisins - this gives a bit more sweetness and body to the finished peach wine.
Acid Blend - balances the flavour and mouth feel
Yeast Nutrient - Supports the yeast reproduction.
Pectinase / Pectic Enzyme - breaks down the pectins in the fruit, preventing cloudiness and gelling from the boiling process. We’re making wine, not peach jam!
How to Make Sparkling Peach Wine
As I’d mentioned earlier - like other sweet white wine types - peach wine is especially nice as a bubbly beverage.
There are two main ways to accomplish this, both of which happen AFTER fermentation has ceased.
Note: Consult your local homebrew store for what your options are when it comes to bottling sparkling wine.
As this ferments a bit in the bottle, normal wine bottles aren’t a good idea - they can explode from the extra pressure.
We’ll usually use beer bottle and caps for any sparkling wine or sparkling ciders that we make, but there are options more along the lines of champagne bottles.
Selection and brands tend to vary wildly by location.
Anyway!
For Naturally Carbonated Sparkling Peach Wine
In a small pot, mix together 1 cup of water with 1 cup of sugar or brown sugar. Use a sanitized funnel to pour this into a sanitized large carboy.
Rack the wine over into this carboy, swirling it as you go.
Bottle the wine into appropriate bottles, following directions for whatever kind of cap/closure you will be using.
Allow wine to age at least a month or two – residual yeast will ferment the added sugar, carbonating the wine. Serve chilled.
For Force-Carbonated Sparkling Wine
Alternatively, you can rack the wine (without the added sugar syrup!) into a keg and force carbonate it, if you have the set up for that - That’s what we tend to do with our ciders.
More Home Brewing Recipes!
While you've got your current homebrew fermenting away, why not consider putting a batch of something else on, to occupy your wait time? Here are a few of my best wine, cider, and mead recipes:
Wine Recipes
Banana Wine Recipe
Blackberry Wine Recipe
Blackcurrant Wine Recipe
Blueberry Wine Recipe
Cherry Wine Recipe
Cranberry Clementine Christmas Wine Recipe
Cranberry Wine Recipe
Faux Lingonberry Wine
Lychee Wine Recipe
Mango Strawberry Wine Recipe
Mango Wine Recipe
Mint Wine Recipe
Lychee Wine Recipe
Partridgeberry Wine Recipe
Passionfruit Wine Recipe
Stone Fruit Wine Recipe
Strawberry Wine Recipe
Ube Wine Recipe
Watermelon Wine Recipe
Mead Recipes
Black Cherry Mead Recipe
Blueberry-Clementine Mead Recipe
Blueberry Mead Recipe
Clementine Mead Recipe
Pumpkin Mead Recipe
Wildflower Mead Recipe
Cider & Miscellaneous Homebrew Recipes
Hard Apple Cider Recipe
Home Brew Hard Iced Tea Recipe
Maple Hard Apple Cider Recipe
Share the Love!
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Homemade Peach Wine Recipe
Equipment
- Large pot
- Slotted Spoon
- Large wire strainer
- 2 gallon fermenter bucket and lid
- 1 air lock and stopper
- Long spoon / paddle
- 2 1 gallon carboys
- Siphon, siphon tubing.
Ingredients
- 4 Lbs Fresh peaches
- 6 cups Granulated Sugar
- 1 gallon Spring Water
- 1 cup Golden Raisins
- 1 teaspoon Acid Blend
- 1 teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
- ½ teaspoon Pectinase / Pectic enzyme
- Yeast
Instructions
Prepare the “Must”:
- Wash peaches and chop them into small chunks, discarding any brown patches.
- Add peaches to a large pot. Add sugar, stir well. Cover and let it sit for a few hours, stirring every once in a while.
- After about 2-3 hours, the sugar should have nicely macerated the peaches, and have extracted as much juice as possible. Add as much of the water as your pot can handle, bring ALMOST to a boil.
- Once water starts bubbling, turn the temp to low and simmer for 1 hour. Think more “keep it warm”, than any kind of active simmer.
- While the pot is simmering, prepare your primary fermenter bucket:
- Wash and sanitize a 2 gallon plastic fermenter, lid, stopper, air lock, and nylon straining bag. (The bag is optional, we don’t bother!)
- Place raisins, acid blend, yeast nutrient, and pectic enzyme into the plastic fermenter.
- Affix the stopper to the lid of the fermenter, cover and set aside.
- Once the hour is up, remove peaches from heat, allow to cool. It doesn’t have to be all the way to room temperature, just cool enough that if it splashes on you, it won’t hurt - that’s a good guideline
- Carefully pour peaches and water into the fermenter - into the nylon bag, if using. Tie off the bag - if applicable - and top up with any remaining water.
- Affix air lock to lid, cover the bucket, and allow to fully cool over night.
- For the sake of consistency in readings - and therefore accuracy in ABV calculations - this should be done where you plan to let the wine ferment for the next few months - usually a basement.
Primary Fermentation:
- The next morning, check the Specific Gravity and write it down in your notes, along with the date.
- Add yeast to the fermenter bucket, stir with a long, sanitized spoon. Affix the lid, allow to sit for 24 hours.
- The next day, check to make sure that the yeast has started fermenting - there should be bubbles in the airlock, and/or foam in the liquid.
- Put the lid back on, allow to ferment for one week.
Secondary Fermentation and Beyond:
- After a week or so, use your sanitized siphon setup to rack the must into a freshly sanitized one gallon carboy. Put the carboy - your secondary fermentation vessel - somewhere cool (not cold!), and leave it alone for a month or so.
- Using sanitized equipment, rack the peach wine off the sediment, into a clean, freshly sanitized carboy. Cap with sanitized airlock, leave it alone for another 1 month.
- Rack one more time, leave it for another 2 months or so.
- When your wine has been racked a few times and shows NO more fermenting activity for a month or so (no bubbles in the airlock, no more sediment being produced, you can move on to bottling.
- Follow the instructions on your selected type of wine stabilizer to stop fermentation from restarting. For potassium sorbate, this needs to be done 2-3 days before bottling.
- Using sanitized equipment, take a gravity reading, then rack the wine into clean, sanitized bottles. Cork.
Nikki W
I would like to make this with peach concentrate. How much concentrate is equal to the 4# of peaches in recipe? TIA
Marie Porter
What do you mean by peach concentrate? What are the ingredients?
Jim
Hey I've been making fruit wines for many years, just started a 6 gal. batch from part of the harvest of my peach trees. Your recipe and instructions should result in a nice peach wine even for novices, nice job! Of all the wines I make the peach is one of my favorites, never a bad batch! Happy wine making!
Nikki D
Hi , my husband and I are new to wine making. I would like to know if the raisins in the peach wine are optional or not. I can’t wait to get started on this , we have already picked our peaches
Marie Porter
You can skip them if you like, they just give a bit more body to the wine.
Nikki
Thanks so much for getting back to me. I will be starting first thing in the morning
Nikki
I am making 4 gallons of the peach wine. I used the calculator in the recipe. I know you said about not adding more yeast unless you are doing 5 gallons. My question is this. Yeast is listed twice on the ingredients the one says add 4 tsp of yeast nutrient and the other just says yeast ( which I am assuming just means the yeast packet. Am I still only just using 1 tsp of yeast nutrient and 1 packet of yeast ? I have my peaches all cut up and Macerating right now. So excited !!
Marie Porter
Yeast is the yeast packet, yeast nutrient is a supplement to the yeast. YOu can skip it if you don't have any, though.
Dave
Hi, substitute pairs for peaches, should I follow the same recipe? Or will pairs require changes? Thanks,
Marie Porter
Pears should work fine
Alex
Hello! When do you remove the peach from the must? Also do you squize them to extract the juice when removing?
Marie Porter
I don't squeeze anything. You don't remove the peach from the must, you remove the must from the peaches, when you rack it off.
Gunnar Södergren
Hi! Just started with this recipe, and super-excited.
I have a question regarding this step:
"After a week or so, use your sanitized siphon setup to rack the must into a freshly sanitized one gallon carboy. Put the carboy - your secondary fermentation vessel - somewhere cool (not cold!), and leave it alone for a month or so."
This is where I will "get rid of" the remains of the chopped up peaches and raisins, right? By siphoning it.
Marie Porter
Right! You're racking it off the sediment and fruit.
Gunnar Södergren
Hi!
I'm at the last few steps of making this wine, and a few questions arose.
It's been sitting for two months now and I just re-racked it to get rid of a lot of sediment. The gravity reading is still at around 16, and I'm seeing bubbling activity in the airlock when I push down on the lid of my fermenting bucket (it's plastic). It also has a rather weird taste. Should I leave it longer before stabilising and then bottling?
Marcella R Backer
Can I substitute Pindo palm fruit (called Jellies) for the peaches?
Marie Porter
I'm not familiar with that fruit, so I have no idea, sorry!