Homemade Strawberry Wine Recipe
Made right - IE as a sweet, NOT dry wine - homemade strawberry wine is fantastic!
It's also a great way to use up large amounts of strawberries. I'm sure we're not alone in having had those times when our desire to go berry picking resulted in WAY more strawberries than we'd be able to eat before they go bad!
As wines go, this one is pretty basic - you get some fruit and some sugar. Add some water and yeast, and let it do it's thing for a while, before you move the wine off the fruit and let it continue doing its thing. Repeat a few times, put it in bottles, and let it age.
Aging is important - the wine you get when it first starts resembling wine is only technically potable. Aging makes it smooth out and turn into something you'll actually LIKE drinking!
Ingredients for Homemade Strawberry Wine
This homemade strawberry wine recipe uses few ingredients, but it's important to make them the right ones. Most importantly:
Strawberries
You can use fresh or frozen strawberries, there are just a few differences in how to use them, and things to keep in mind:
Fresh Strawberries
Use ripe strawberries, picking through to remove anything that's not ripe, is moldy, etc. Hull them and discard the leaves/stems. I like to chop the strawberries and let them sit in sugar for a couple hours before starting on the wine making, as it - maceration - draws the juices out of the berries
Frozen Strawberries
Choose frozen strawberries that do NOT have added sugar, as that will affect the recipe. If you MUST use strawberries with added sugar, cut the recipe sugar by about 2 cups and cross your fingers! You'll likely have to adjust sweetening after the fact anyway.
When using frozen strawberries - with or without sugar - you can skip the maceration process. Freezing and thawing strawberries breaks them down in a way that ends up with a result similar to maceration.
Sugar
Use plain white granulated sugar, as brown sugar will overpower the delicate taste of the strawberries.
Strawberry wine really needs to be a sweet wine, or it doesn't taste like much of anything. Depending on how your yeast progresses, you will likely need to back sweeten it.
Back Sweetening
Once fermentation is completely finished and the wine has clarified, you can stabilize it with something like Potassium Sorbate, which will prevent fermentation from re-activating - and this is important, when adding more sugar to the wine.
Sugar is FOOD for the yeast, so adding it without preventing more fermentation will just start the whole thing over again - and you will end up with jet fuel!
Once the wine is stabilized, you can make a thick simple syrup of 1 part water to 2 parts sugar - Say, 1/2 cup water to 1 cup sugar, to start. Bring it to a boil to sterilize it, then use sanitized equipment to add it - bit by bit - to your wine, to taste.
Again, use sanitized equipment for removing wine from the carboy for sampling. You don't want to introduce microbes of any kind to the wine!
Basics of Wine Making
Now that I've gone into one of the late-stage aspects of wine making, let me backtrack and address the basics!
If you haven't attempted making wine before, don't be intimidated! Check out our primer to home brewing, it starts here, with parts 2 and 3 here and here. Just a small handful of entries, and you'll be good to go!
More Wine Recipes
While you've got your Homemade Strawberry Wine fermenting away, why not consider putting a batch of something else on, to occupy your wait time?
Here are a few of my other wine recipes:
Homemade Banana Wine Recipe
Homemade Blackberry Recipe
Homemade Blueberry Recipe
Homemade Cherry Recipe
Homemade Clementine Mead Recipe
Homemade Cranberry Clementine Christmas Wine Recipe
Homemade Faux Lingonberry Wine Recipe
Homemade Hard Apple Cider Recipe
Homemade Mango Wine Recipe
Homemade Mint Wine Recipe
Homemade Newfoundland Partridgeberry Wine Recipe
Homemade Strawberry Wine Recipe
Homemade Watermelon Wine Recipe
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Homemade Strawberry Wine
Equipment
Ingredients
- 6 lbs fresh strawberries*
- 3.5 lbs white sugar
- 1 gallon spring water
- 1 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1/2 tsp acid blend
- 1/2 tsp pectic enzyme
- 1/8 tsp wine tannin
- 1 packet Red Star “Cote de Blancs” yeast Or yeast of choice
- Wine stabilizer of choice optional
Instructions
- Rinse and pick through strawberries, removing any that are moldy, etc. Remove stems, chop them up.
- Place in a large pot, along with the sugar. Using a potato masher or VERY clean hands, stir and mash strawberries. Let sit for an hour.
- Add water, stir well. Heat to ALMOST boiling, then simmer gently for 30 minutes.
- Stir in acid blend, enzyme, nutrient, and tannin.
- Pour mixture into a freshly sanitized fermenting bucket. Cover with sanitized lid and air lock, allow to cool to room temperature (overnight).
- The next morning, give the mixture a quick stir with a long, sanitized spoon, and – using sanitized equipment – take a gravity reading of the liquid (strain out any strawberries). Keep track of the number! (This is an optional step, but will allow you to calculate your final ABV %)
- Sprinkle yeast into fermenter, cover with sanitized cover and air lock. Within 48 hours, you should notice fermentation activity – bubbles in the airlock, carbonation and /or swirling in the wine must. This means you’re good to go!
- After a week or so, use your sanitized siphon setup to rack the must into a freshly sanitized carboy. Put the carboy somewhere cool (not cold!), and leave it alone for a month or so.
- Using sanitized equipment, rack the wine off the sediment, into a clean, freshly sanitized carboy. Cap with sanitized airlock, leave it alone for another 2-3 months.
- Rack one more time, leave it for another 3 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. **
- If stabilizing, follow the instructions on your selected type of wine stabilizer to stop fermentation. 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.
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