Wild Raspberry - suggestions?

[Wine-o-Dale]

Hey everyone, I'm a newbie and are traveling the US in our travel trailer and just found a raspberry patch at the campground here in Georgia and would like suggestions of what to make. I have to try it, I've only done 1 kit wine (5 gal) and its in the secondary right now for about 6 days. I wanted to try a 1-gal with the Raspberrys or mix it with something. Not sure what to mix it with or if the raspberrys by themselves are good enough.
Edited by: Wine-o-Dale

 

[grapeman]

Dale, pick the berries and see how many you can get. You could start out with plain raspberry wine and mix late with something else if you wanted to. Northern Winos has a lot of raspberry mixture recipes here on the forum. Use the search feature and look through some. You may need to search any date to get ones from last year to come up. She uses grape concentrate with hers to give it body, etc. If she is feeling good soon she will surely help you out(chemotherapy can make her sick but never gets her down).

 

[Wine-o-Dale]

OK... thanks. I will do the searchs. I found this one, but will look for others as well. I forgot to say these were black raspberries.

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/blackras.asp

 

[NorthernWinos]

Dale...sounds like you living an American Dream...The life of the North American Nomad...fun!!!!

Pick all those beautiful berries you can find...a lucky score for sure.....Keep looking for other berries in your travels and if possible freeze them and keep them till you settle down and can mix up some wines.

We have made many batches of different Raspberry wines....The Raspberry flavors always shine through, even if you use them in other fruits...like adding them to a kit or mixing them with other juices.

Life is a trip...enjoy your journey and share it with us.

 

[Wade E]

Jack Keller is a stellar wine maker but Im not fond of his tarting SG's as he likes to get as much alcohol out of all his wines. I and most other people like to start their fruit wines off with a much lower SG around 1.085 which is enough abv to keep a wine for quite some time and not over power the fruit taste. This will require adjusting the amount of sugar to a lower level.

 

[smurfe]

A good raspberry wine has to be one of my favorites. A couple really good suggestions thrown at you already. Freeze them if you can. This really helps with juice extraction from the fruit as it breaks down the cell walls that will release more juice.


Also, keep the starting gravities on the lower side. Fruit wines will taste really "hot" in the mouth with too high of an alcohol content. The lower alcohol levels will allow the fruits flavor to come through where if alcohol is too high, it will cover it. I have a batch of raspberry here bottled that I will probably dump as the wine is like rocket fuel.