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Non-Grape-Based Wines a Good Addition to Custom Wine Cellars?

Besides grapes, there are many other fruits that can be made into surprisingly delicious wines. Wine collectors, often with whole room residential custom wine cellars dedicated to their collections are finding these can make a great addition to the diversity of their collections.

Non-Grape-Based Wines

Non-Grape-Based Wines

Just about every country in the world has at least one winery that produces alternative fruit wines. There are locations all around the world, such as Massachusetts in the USA, where grapes can’t grow due to their climate.

Crops typically used in making fruit wines include apples, plums, raspberries, cherries, peaches, blackberries, pineapples, pears, and even watermelons. Should you attempt to make these types of wines yourself it’s important to make sure you pick overripe fruits but avoid those with too many bruises.

Fruit wines can be made from any plant matter capable of being fermented. In order to achieve the desired taste and aroma, some of these products need honey or sugar to be added to them. Fruit winemaking involves many of the same techniques used in making grape wines. When made commercially there is a machine that gets rid of the stalks and washes off the bugs etc. and in some wineries, the juice is separated from the skins through a crusher.

The fruit juice is then put into a fermenting container. Yeast can be found naturally in some fruits (such as grapes) and can also be produced through laboratory processes on other fruits. Yeast consumes the available sugar in juice and converts that sugar into 50% alcohol. The process called Chaptalization helps increase the alcohol content of the finished wine.

The fermentation process then begins. Most winemakers leave the pulp in the juice for the first 7 days to add character and deepen the wine’s color.

In the process of making fruit wines, there are necessary adjustments that must be made to the acidity of the fruit juice, the amount of fruit used per gallon, and the amount of available sugar. Sometimes, tannin or acid must be added to balance the taste, thus producing great tasting fruit wines at the standard you expect for your wine cellar.

The wine-making hydrometer is a device that not only helps determine the amount of sugar in your juice but the amount of sugar needed to provide the sweetness you want in your wine and the amount of alcohol that sugar can produce as well.

Typically non-grape-based wines cannot be stored for a very long time. Some need to be consumed within 12 months of their products because they lack the natural yeast present in grapes. This potentially limited aging and life span should be taken into account when racking in your wine room. In order to promote further fermentation, phosphorus, nitrogen or potassium must be added.

An example of fruit wine is plum wine, which is famous in Korea and Japan. Other popular fruit wines include pineapple wine, cherry wine, banana wine, raspberry wine, and apple wine.

Fruit wines are perfect for any occasion, an excellent addition to your wine rooms‘ selection and can provide unique flavors and aromas. You can even make fruit wines at home by following simple winemaking processes.

Quality Wines for Your Wine Cellar with the Right Wine Press

In winemaking, the juice must be extracted from the grapes and you must have the skill, time and fine blend of fruits to make great tasting wines. Pressing is one of the processes involved in winemaking, which is the act of applying pressure to grapes or other fruits to separate juice or wine from them and their skins.

Most wineries use a device called the winepress to increase their production per ton. The amount of juice produced from pressing makes up about 30% of the total juice volume from grapes. Before the arrival of modern winemaking, winemakers pressed grapes in a large basin using their feet. Take a look below at the different styles of wine presses which help in the production of high-quality wines (especially those that deserve to be stored in a functional custom wine cellar).

Basket Press 

The first type of wine press was the basket style press which is one of the oldest means of extracting grape juice. Most basket presses are made of wood and are manually operated. The operator of a basket press throws batches of grapes into the basket (or a cylinder of wooden slats), positions the top plate in its proper place and slowly lowers it down until the juice flows from the wooden slats. With enough pressure, the grapes are crushed and the grape juice is extracted from them leaving the skins, stems, seeds, and pulp of the fruit also known as pomace.

The main advantage of the basket press is its ability to reduce the filtering needed for the finished product and to lessen the bitterness caused by seeds and stems. Another benefit of this style of wine press is its affordability.

Bladder Press 

The bladder press makes use of household water pressure through a garden hose to expand a bladder located in the center of the press.  It has a large cylinder closed at each end, where the fruits are loaded into. As the bladder expands, it pushes and presses the grapes against the sides.

Bladder presses are popular for the high-quality wines they can produce. They are also known to be gentler to the grapes compared to basket presses. By using a bladder press, the astringency is reduced because it doesn’t crack the seeds. Other advantages of bladder presses include less physical effort required to operate, they can be moved around easily because of its lightweight and they are easy to sanitize.

Horizontal Screw Press 

The principle used in a horizontal screw press is the same as that of the basket press. Grapes are squeezed not by bringing down a plate from above but by bringing down plates from either side of a closed cylinder. It can handle far more grapes compared to the basket press and bladder press. Only medium pressure is required in using this device.

Other styles of wine presses that provide lots of benefits to winemakers include the continuous screw press, vertical screw press, and pneumatic press. Whichever press you want to use in winemaking, make sure that the right amount of pressure is used to produce high-quality wines for your wine cellar.