feijoa wine

I have a couple of entries on feijoa wine to post, but I’ll start with this one, which is from an article How to make feijoa wine by Peter Jeffries, appearing on the Yellow Pages ‘How to’ website.

I confess that I’ve never made wine of any kind, but I do like that Jeffries describes this as “not that difficult” and that it only costs “a few dollars for some ingredients from your local brew shop.”

FEIJOA WINE

Ingredients

• Enough feijoas to yield 1 ½ kilos of feijoa flesh
• 1 kilo of sugar
• 4 litres of water
• 1 Campden tablet
• ¼ teaspoon of tannin
• ¼ teaspoon of malic acid
• ½ teaspoon of tartaric acid
• 1 ½  teaspoon pectic enzyme
• 1 package of wine yeast
• 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient

Method

1. Freeze the feijoas, thaw them and then scoop out the flesh. This freeze/thaw process helps weaken the cell walls and allows the fruit to release more flavour during the fermentation process.
2. Place the feijoa flesh in a large plastic bin or bucket.
3. Use a potato masher to mash up the fruit – this will further break down the fruit and free its juice.
4. Add your water and sugar and stir until the sugar is dissolved.
5. Add the tannin, malic acid, tartaric acid and pectic enzyme.
6. Crush the Campden tablet and add this to the mixture. Campden tablets contain sodium metabisulphite and are used to kill bacteria and inhibit the growth of wild yeast.
7. Cover your bucket with a cloth and leave it to sit for three days. Stir it morning and evening each day.
8. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth into a clean bucket.
9. Add the yeast nutrient and the wine yeast. It’s best to “start” the yeast first. Do this by mixing it with one tablespoon of sugar and 60 ml luke warm water and leaving it to stand for 15 minutes.
10. Cover the bucket with a cloth and leave it to stand for 6 days – this is where your primary fermentation will take place.
11. Siphon the wine off the sediment that will have collected at the bottom of the bucket and transfer the wine to a fermenting bin with an airlock – your wine is now entering its secondary fermentation phase.
12. Place the fermentation bin in a cool dark place and leave for 30 days.
13. After 30 days, siphon the wine from the fermentation bin, discard the collected sediment and then return the wine and ferment for a further 90 days.

When fermentation is complete, bottle the wine and age in a cool dark place for at least 6 months before drinking.