These days, I’m surrounded by fruit trees that produce a wonderful variety of tropical fruits - mountain apple, jaboticaba, star fruit, lychee, and more. And I’ve always kinda wanted to experiment with making my own wine.
So tell me, what should I invest in so that I can get started? Any websites or books? Any wine yeast I can get through Amazon that is particular good? Any common mistakes to avoid?
My biggest concern is that when I looked into making fruit wine a few years ago while I was living in Jakarta, it seemed that I would not be able to create the cool dark conditions needed. Now that I’m in Hawai’i, it is better, but still not great. It’s not going to be possible to create a storage area where the temperature is steadily below about 78 degrees F.
I’ve made wine using bananas that was actually very good. You can buy the supplies you need (two 1, 3, or 6 gallon carboys, clear tubing for racking, a fitting for the carboy, a corker, etc) as a beginner’s kit, or find someone selling theirs used. I’ve always made 6 gallons at a time since it is the same amount of work to make one gallon as it is to make six
There are many good books, I’d buy a few. With any home-made wine I never try a sip until it is bottled and aged at least 6 months. Fermentation is easier at slightly too high temperatures than slightly too low.
The temperature will be an issue. Yeast make heat during fermentation so if you don’t have a way to remove it they can stress themselves and make some funky flavors. There are two ways to address the issue though. First is to find yeast that like it hot or at least react to stress by putting out flavors you like. The second is to build a cooling device. It could be as simple as a metal coil that you run into your fermenting wine and run tap water through that wastes a lot of water though. You can get more complicated from there once you enjoy what you’re doing.
Fruit is tough since aside from apple the juice/sugar concentration is fairly low. There are lots of good books on making cider I like: The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers by Claude Jolicoeur but it isn’t really targeted at beginners. You might also look into fruit meads since they are made similarly but incorporate more of the unusual fruit.
Kayaker’s like of equipment is great for starting off though a 5 gallon fermentation bucket can replace the carboy and be a little easier to carry. It also makes dropping a cooling coil in a bit easier.
As far as yeast I’d start off with EC-1118 it can be a bit sulphury at high temps but it will eat anything and it pretty neutral overall.
I’d suggest using a garbage disposal initially for your fruit prep since a press is a bit expensive. Just buy one from home depot and mount it to some wood over your brew bucket. Apples can contain enough juice that you can strain the resulting pulp and just ferment the juice. If you want to start with other fruit I would make a sugar water base and then add the pulp to the water and then ferment on the pulp with a bunch of pectinase. For the sugar water I’d start out about 1 pound of white sugar per gallon of water, that will get you to just under 5% abv with the sugar from the fruit getting you up into the 6% range. That will make it easy to ferment and you can adjust as you like.
Good suggestions so far. I’ve made several fruit wines, and as Oredigger77 says, you’ll have to add sugar for anything except apples. To that end, I’d recommend one additional piece of equipment, a hydrometer so you can measure sugar content. It’s cheap and is critical for both determining how much sugar to add at the start, and monitoring the fermentation progress.
For yeast, don’t worry about getting some fancy expensive yeast. Lalvin mentioned above is great. I like Red Star, but they’re pretty much the same. This page has a good description of the strains. For wines that I want more fruity with a little residual sweetness, I like Cote des Blancs. For drier fruit wines, the Premier Blanc is good.
I now have an apple grinder and fruit press, but the first time I made pear wine, I chopped up the pears, put them in a mesh bag and pounded on them with a rubber mallet, then added the entire bag of pulp to my sugar water and fermented on the pulp. The garbage disposal will do a better job, but this is an easy option if you aren’t sure you want to commit. Note that a fruit press alone does fine with soft fruit like grapes and berries, but not for denser fruit like apples and pears. You need something to grind them first.
Thanks, this is helpful stuff.
Is adding sugar really always necessary? I suspect it will be for most the fruits I have available, but some tropical fruits are extremely sweet - would sugar be required if I used very sweet mangos? (I’m just idly curious, I don’t think I’ll be making mango wine as there is no mango tree on the property.)
I’ve never fermented mangos myself. From a quick googling around it appears that the juice is roughly comparable to an apple in sugar content. At that point the question would be how much juice can you get from the mango and it seems that mangoes are fairly fibrous (I’ve never juiced one myself) so I would guess that the issue with mango wine would be how many mangoes you need to juice to get 5 gallons rather than the alcohol content.
Generally, apples are about 1/2-1/3 of the sugar of grapes and will get 4-8% ABV while grapes will get you about 14%. Berries and such will get you down in the 3% ABV range which is why they are sugared to get them out of the sex in a canoe category.
Home winemaking for dummies… as is the rest of the series…fabulous book. https://www.amazon.com/Home-Winemaking-Dummies-Tim-Patterson/dp/047067895X
you may also want to check out one of the bibles of the trade
Not specifically wine, but alot of good info that still applies. I did alot of EVIL hard cider for a few years.
you will pretty much always want more sugar…its going to get converted to more alcohol. You dont HAVE to use white sugar, you can use honey, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, and a few other things, most will infuence the flavor. Thats half the fun though is learning to make things you like. Split a batch and try some with honey, some with brown sugar. Test thoroughly when done. 
Yeah, I think this is going to be the problem. I can’t imagine getting enough juice from mangoes to make wine. Even if you did, it would be so thick that I think it would be kind of disgusting to drink straight as a wine. Which means you’re probably going to dilute it, which means you’ll probably need some sugar.
Pick up a hydrometer and it will tell you quickly how much sugar you need. Most of them have % alcohol as one of the scales, or there are simple conversion charts for Brix to %.
[SDMB pedant hat on]Mangoes vary wildly in almost every characteristic you can think of - size, color, sweetness, and fibrousness, to name some of the obvious ones. Some have very little fiber. [/Pedant hat off.]
I like the way you think.
Making wine from fruit is a pulpy gooey mess no matter what. After a couple rounds of racking most of the fibers and particulate content should settle out.