How to Make Raspberry Wine: A Simple One-Gallon Recipe from Start to Finish

Raspberry wine is a fermented alcoholic drink made from red raspberries and table sugar. This article will guide you through the process of brewing Jack Keller’s simple and easy raspberry wine recipe.

We’ll show you the process from start to finish, as well as include a tasting and some notes for the next time.

This wine is just under 10% ABV.

Ingredients

The ingredients for Jack Keller’s raspberry wine are:

• 3 pounds of red raspberries
• 1 pound 11 ounces of granulated sugar
• Water to 1 gallon
• 4 teaspoons of pectic enzyme
• 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient (we’re using diamonium phosphate)
• Half a teaspoon of yeast energizer
• 1 gram of Fermaid K
• Lalvin’s RC 212, a red wine yeast

Process

1. Preparation: Begin by heating some water until it’s warm enough to dissolve the sugar into a syrup. Pack your raspberries into muslin straining bags and place them into your sanitized brewing bucket.
2. Mixing: Dissolve your sugar in the heated water until it goes crystal clear. Pour the sugar water over the raspberries in the brewing bucket. Top up the bucket to just over the one-gallon mark.
3. Adding Supplements: Add your yeast energizer, followed by your first dose of yeast nutrient and then your pectic enzyme. Pitch your yeast right on top.
4. Fermentation: Seal the bucket with a sanitized lid. For the first several days, open the bucket and move the bag around to press the bag and kind of punch the cap on the fruit. This prevents the brew bags from getting dried out on top and risk growing mold or some other sort of infection.
5. Second Stage Fermentation: After about a week, once your gravity gets down close to 1.030, remove the bags from the bucket before fermentation is done. Press out any remaining juice in the bags with another sanitized bowl. Add your second dose of yeast nutrient and seal the bucket until fermentation is complete.
6. Racking: After a couple of weeks, rack the wine from primary into secondary so it can finish clearing up.
7. Bottling: After a few more weeks, bottle up the wine.

Tasting

The raspberry wine has a deep red color and a fresh raspberry aroma. It smells like there’s a little bit of sweetness here even though it was fermented dry and did no sweetening. The aroma is unmistakably raspberry.

The taste is all raspberry and quite dry. It drinks very much like a tart kind of white wine kind of flavor but with that nice berriness in there. As it opens up, the tannin gets grippier and grippier to where you can feel that raspberry flavor kind of hanging out down the middle of your tongue.

This raspberry wine is evidence that sometimes you can do something really simple, really geared toward a self-balancing recipe that doesn’t need a lot of lemon juice or tea or raisins or any of that other stuff in it. Just letting the fruit itself do the work and making sure it has good nutrition so the fermentation goes off flawlessly.

Final Thoughts

This raspberry wine recipe is a great example of how simple and straightforward homebrewing can be. With just a few ingredients and some patience, you can create a delicious and unique wine that’s perfect for sharing with friends or enjoying on your own.

So why not give it a try? Happy brewing!