Freeze strawberries for fpac?

[FishNiX]

As the title states, I'm gunna make an fpac for my strawberry wine. Do you all freeze the berries first? Thanks!

 

[countrygirl]

i am freezing all my fruit first. something about making the sugar more available??? i'm sure someone with more experience will know. i just put my strawberry patch in this year, so we had verrry few, but the few we had were delicious.

 

[Wade E]

With strawberries it doesnt help as much as it does with other fruits since strawberries break down very easily once cut open. The main purpose we freeze our fruits is to actually break open the fruit instead of having a crusher or some mechanical way of doing it. Can you imagine trying to split open every blueberry for a 6 gallon batch. It does help to extract more color and flavor buy breaking open the fruit like this and let the pectic enzyme get in and do their thing.