THICK COUNTRY WINES

How do I thicken my country wines?

This topic sprang to mind after this winter's reverie in one of those recent "NEVER AGAIN" moments when a "thick" head is the order of most of the following day.

I have been asked this very question many times over the years by various home wine-makers with insipid wines, and it is easily overcome with a little fore-thought.

There are basically three ways you can achieve more body, they all have to be considered at the starting stage, and are:

1 --- By using a can of grape juice instead of some of the water and sugar at the starting point.
2 --- Use blackberry related fruit as a percentage of the must.
3 --- Incorporate the boilings from mushy bananas!

There are perhaps other, more chemically biased methods, that can be used but it is best to steer clear of these and stick with the more natural methods.

The grape juice one seems to be well accepted these days, although this biases the flavour towards the grape extract that was used, and tends to be used for off-white wines.

If you are aiming at producing something like elderflower or dandelion wine, then you want a crisp, sharp white wine, and this method is not too good.

For the deep reds, blackberries and their relations, loganberries, tayberries and others produce a wine with body, and if any of these are added to a basic elderberry, say two pounds of elderberries to a pound of blackberries per gallon, then you will have an earlier (needing a little less maturing) deep red wine, with leanings towards a port wine.

For lighter reds, say raspberry, these fruits cannot be added as they will mask the colour and flavour most noticably and you will be rather unsatisfied with your end product.

However, this is where the third type fits in beautifully.

Mushy bananas........ I'm not kidding!!!!

It's an old idea and one that I have tried with all sorts of wines. It works beautifully with reds, with no noticable flavour imparted to the wines, but with whites (Yes, I even tried that too!) there is a residue of flavour remaining that is just discernable, so perhaps the grape juice idea is better suited here.

If you place around a pound of mushy, almost over-ripe and gooey, (just as they are starting to turn from brown to black inside) chopped bananas in a pan, cover with water (three pints or so) and simmer for around twenty minutes, that way extracting all the goodness from the bananas into the water, then use the cooled, banana-ified liquid to make up part of a one gallon batch for your wine fermentation purposes.

So one pound suits one gallon! You can use other quantities if you want to, but this works nicely for me.

This method works beautifully for the paler, off-whites, like carrot, parsnip, peach, apricot, raspberry, red currant and the likes. In fact any wine you make with either a pinkish or yellowish tinge is good.

Hope this helps,

George