Building a recipe

[mindy]

Hi everyone. I am new to the wine making world and need some help. I want to make a batch of wine but I have no idea on how to incorporate the ingredients I have and what amounts to use.
Here's what I have
2gls of blackberries/mulberries (still gathering both)
Dried elderberries
Dried and powdered hibiscus flower
2-3lb of dried rose hips
Lots of cinnamon chips

My only experience here is mixing up my own herbal tea blends. The flavors mix well in tea but I'm not sure how it work in a wine. Any thoughts, help or suggestions would be awesome.

 

[salcoco]

Google Jack Keller,s web site, he has many recipes using the ingredients you have listed.

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Mindy, and welcome. No sage advice from me but I would think that the same ratios that make for a really tasty herbal tea will likely make for a drinkable wine. To test that idea I would simply make a gallon of herbal tea and measure the specific gravity of the liquor (I am assuming that there will be some sugars coming from the berries). You then add enough honey (for a mead) or table sugar to raise that gravity to be about 1.090 (or the equivalent of about 2.25 lbs of sugar in a gallon of liquid. One pound of sugar (or honey) increases the gravity by 40 points (or 1.040).
All that said, - and I know nothing about how to concoct herbal teas - I would again, "experiment" by perhaps steeping the fruit and herbs for enough time to extract as much of the flavor as you can from them and that might be longer than you would if you were simply making tea - this, because the action of the fermentation may blow off some or much of the flavor and aromatic molecules that would otherwise be found in the tea. What you don't want to do (obviously) is steep the herbs and the fruit to extract an excessive amount of tannins (the chemicals that make your mouth pucker). My thought would be that 24 hours of steeping might be adequate... but others with more experience may have very different views.

 

[mindy]

Thank you for the replies. I have looked at jack Keller's website and he uses all the ingredients I listed but not together.
I guess I need to look around some more and do some experimenting.

 

[Jericurl]

It's all about experimentation and finding what you like.
Don't stress too much about not having a proper recipe to follow. If you like all of those ingredients in tea, you will probably like them in a wine as well.

The recipes can be as simple or as complicated as you want.
You can make wine with just fruit, water, and some type of sugar for the yeast to consume. Or you can get all kinds of crazy ingredients and add some in primary, some in secondary, even some in tertiary, etc.

I would encourage you to go ahead and buy some pectic enzyme, yeast nutrient, yeast energizer, yeast, and tannin. And some campden tablets.
And a hydrometer.

There are many recipes for rosehips wine. Since that is what you have the most of, I would start there. And I have yet to see a recipe that would be ruined by the addition of berries, so I doubt throwing those in would hurt a rosehip wine.

If I was making a wine with the ingredients you have, I would probably boil about 1.5 gallons of water, draw off and add all the rosehips. Cool. Add pectic enzyme and all of the fruit. Wait 24 hours. Add sugar or honey. Pitch yeast.

Most of us use a minimum of 3 to 5 lbs of fruit per gallon of wine. I'd probably add what you have now along with everything else in primary.

Rack when SG hits 1.01 or below.
I'd probably rack onto an ounce or two of dried elderberry, then let it sit under airlock for about a month and rack again. Elderberry comes through very strongly in wine, so you may not want to add if you don't care for that flavor. We have a Wine of the Month thread every month in the Beginner Forum that would be great for helping build a recipe if you want to join in.