When I make a gallon of wine, I prefer to actually make about a gallon and a quarter. This enables me to keep the wine topped up, even after racking off the lees, which I normally do only about once and sometimes not at all. Then I throw away the excess wine, if there is any. So this is to make a 1.25 gallon batch, which ultimately reduces to a gallon batch. Be careful when purchasing your dried figs. You do not want any figs that have been sulfited. It is common for sulfites to be added to preserve figs. But those same sulfites that keep the bacteria from spoiling the figs will also prevent your yeast from fermenting it.
- 1020 grams dried Turkish figs (this is ~36 oz)
- 658 grams sugar (this is a little over 23 oz, so about 1 pound, 7 oz)
- 1.25 gallons water (technically, 4.73 liters which should weigh about 3.785 kg if you are weighing your ingredients – which you absolutely should be).
- 1.25 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1.25 tsp pectic enzyme
- 3.75 tsp acid blend
- 2 grams wine yeast (with at least 13% alcohol tolerance)
- 1 campden tablet
- 0 grams wine tannins (I add this only so you do not think that I have accidentally omitted the tannins. Figs are extremely tannic; you do not want to add additional tannins. Frankly, they already have too much tannin in them).
Boil the water and add your sugar. Stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Allow the sugar water to come to room temperature. Then pour it in your primary fermentation vessel. You do not need to boil ALL the water, just enough to dissolve the sugar into.
Cut the figs in half, or even quarters. Place the figs in a food grade nylon bag, then add them to the sugar/water mix in the primary fermentation vessel. Add your yeast nutrient, pectic enzyme, acid blend, and campden tablet. Allow to sit for 24 hours.
After 24 hours, pitch your yeast. Allow to ferment for at least three days, maybe up to two weeks, depending on the temperature. At the beginning of your fermentation, your specific gravity should be exactly 1.09. You do not want to move to secondary until your specific gravity is below 1.03.
Move to secondary once your must is below 1.03 specific gravity (7.5 Brix). This will vary in terms of time but will usually be between 3 to 5 days if fermenting at room temperature. You DO want it to still be fermenting when you move to secondary because you want the CO2 to push all the oxygen out of your headspace in your secondary fermentation vessel. If fermentation has stopped, then the oxygen in your headspace can contaminate your wine. I like to let it sit for about a month in secondary before racking it off the lees. But I only like to do one racking before bottling. After a month, I typically let it sit with an airlock for a good ten or eleven months and bottle at the one year mark. By the one year mark, your wine should be crystal clear. If it isn’t crystal clear by the six month mark, you should probably consider adding some more pectic enzyme and possibly even amylase enzyme to clear it up. But I do not like to use fining agents. Time and enzymes should be all you need to produce crystal clear wine.
Edited 5/5/24: My opinion on fining agents has been modified. Although I do not recommend fining your wine as a preemptory action – since many wines will clear on their own with sufficient time – it may be necessary to fine some wines. I should probably say a little bit about why I do not really like fining agents, and why, therefore, I do not like them as first line agents for wine clearing. They can be very effective, of course, but I find that they can also tend to strip the wine of things that you do want in your wines, like tannins and polyphenols that add complex flavors to your wine. So I do not recommend that wines be cleared with such agents unless they have not cleared after a year. After a year in secondary, it is doubtful that more time will be effective in clearing the wine. So if a crystal clear wine is important to you, you might try a fining agent. Do I have a recommendation about which fining agent is best suited to your needs? In my experience, kieselsol and chitosan will clear almost any wine, regardless of what the problem is. A distant second choice might be sparkolloid.
The second thing to be aware of is that fig wine is exceptionally tannic. For this reason, you have to be very patient with fig wine. I recommend that fig wines be bottled no sooner than one year in secondary. After that, they should sit for no less than 2 years in the bottle, in a cool dark place. I would not consider opening a fig wine vintage of less than three years. You may taste the wine at bottling and not be very impressed. In fact, you may find the wine to be absolutely terrible at the one year mark. By year two, it will likely be mediocre. By the end of the third year, the wine will start to be coming into its own. However, additional years of aging will still be beneficial. I have not aged fig wine for 20+ years, but my hunch is that fig wines might continue to develop like the finest aged grape wines. You want to be careful about not adding too much sugar at the outset because high alcohol content wines, in conjunction with high tannins, will make the wine overly harsh. Weigh your sugar carefully and add the correct amount at the outset. If your wine ends up being harsh, the solution might be (although I have not tried this yet, so I don’t have the calculations about just how much to add) to add a lot of sugar, use EC-1118 or Premier Cuvee yeast to try to get up to about 18% alcohol, and then you will have a sweet, high alcohol wine – somewhat like a Port. Although I do not tend to personally like dessert wines, it is unquestionable that sugar can take the edge off of harsh features of wines.
One last thing: you will probably not be able to achieve a bone dry fig wine. Some of the sugars in figs are not fermentable. The wine made from this recipe should be slightly sweet/off dry.
