Drink Your Own Garden (Batsford, 2013) offers more than 140 delicious recipes that make the most of your garden produce. Author Judith Glover encourages readers to experiment with a variety of fresh produce, from plums to melons, to make your own fruit wines, as well as meads and beers. This following Peach Wine recipe is excerpted from the chapter “Fruit Wine.”
You can purchase this book from the Mother Earth Living store: Drink Your Own Garden.
Peach Wine Recipe
Use fresh, well-ripened peaches—if the fruit isn’t quite ripe it will leave an unpleasantly bitter taste in the wine.
• 2 1/2 pounds ripe peaches
• 2 pounds sugar
• 1 lemon
• 1 Camden tablet (a handy form of sulfur dioxide for disinfecting and sterilizing)
• 2 teaspoons pectin enzyme
• 1 gallon water
• Wine yeast
• Yeast nutrient
1. Peel the peaches, remove the stones and crush the fruit. Cover the pulp with 6 pints of cold water, stir in the crushed Camden tablet and pectin enzyme, and leave to steep for 24 hours.
2. Bring a further 2 pints of water to the boil and dissolve the sugar in it.
3. Cool this syrup to blood heat, then add it to the peach pulp together with the yeast and nutrient and the juice of the lemon.
4. Cover closely and leave in a warm place to ferment for 4 days, stirring twice daily.
5. Strain the liquid off the pulp and transfer to a fermenting jar. Fit an air-lock and leave to ferment on, racking when the wine starts to clear. When all fermentation has ceased and the wine cleared, bottle and store in a cool dark place to mature for at least 6 months.
More recipes from Drink Your Own Garden
• Blackberry Wine recipe
• Orange Wine recipe
• Rosehip Wine recipe
Reprinted with permission from Drink Your Own Garden: A Homebrew Guide Using Your Garden Ingredients by Judith Glover and published by Batsford, 2013. Buy this book from our store: Drink Your Own Garden.
