Jujube is a very rare wine. The fruits themselves are not rare in much of the world, but in the United States they are not frequently grown. Even once grown, people do not typically use them to make wine. In fact, Jack Keller’s exhaustive compendium – which gives recipes for 232 different wines, including garlic wine 😳 – does not so much as mention the existence of Jujube wines.
I have found jujube in a lot of alternative medicine formulations. I also grow a single Jujube tree in my backyard orchard – the Li variety – and so I have a lot of personal familiarity with the fruit. To my tastes, the fresh fruit is bland, but acceptable. It has a flavor very much like an insipid apple. Whereas the apple tends to be both sweet and tart, the jujube has only a cloying sweetness. In texture, it also resembles an apple.
If the only thing the Jujube had to offer was the flavor and texture of an inferior apple, then it wouldn’t be terribly exciting to me. After all, apples themselves aren’t high on my list of priorities when it comes to making wine, so why would an inferior apple be appealing to me?
But something truly interesting happens to a jujube if it is not eaten at the above stage: it dries out and completely changes its flavor profile.
In its dried form, the Jujube becomes extremely interesting to my palate. It develops the fragrance and flavor of brown sugar and cinnamon and . . . something else . . . the indescribable flavor of dried jujube that can really only be compared to itself.
Now, I still don’t eat a lot of these, even though I confessedly love the flavor. But the texture holds me back. It has something of the texture of a sticky foam crossed with a bit of rubber. I am not overly fond of the texture. But perhaps nothing could be less relevant than ‘texture’ when evaluating a candidate for a wine. Perhaps a wine is the best forum for expressing jujube’s delightful flavors without having to worry about its disagreeable texture.
There are very few people trying to make this wine, so I will have to craft my recipe from scratch. And since I do not have the right equipment to make precise measurements of things like tannin content, I will have to use my tastebuds to give me reliable feedback about the composition of the final product. So this recipe is a work in progress. If you decide to follow it, be aware that these are my best conservative guesstimates about what the wine will need. (In winemaking, I define a conservative approach as choosing to either overestimate or underestimate, when in doubt, based on which approach will be easiest to “fix” later on down the line unless a reasonable assumption can be made.) So for instance, I am going to assume that jujube has sufficient tannins, because it will be easier to add tannin later than to remove tannin. On the other hand, the conservative approach would tell me not to add much in the way of acid on the off chance that jujube is already a high acid fruit. Again, it is easier to add acid later than it is to try to raise a wine’s ph. But, given that I know that jujube is insipid in its “apple” phase it is safe to assume that it’s not strongly acidic. So I am going to add moderate amounts of acid, because I believe it is safe to assume that jujube is not strongly acidic.
When I Google the pH of dried Jujube – to get a ballpark idea of Jujube’s acidity – I came up with figures ranging from about 4.5 to 5.2. The figure of 5.2 was expressed more than once. So this range puts Jujubes ranging from having the acidity of persimmons to having the acidity of bananas, watermelons, and perhaps figs. Jack Keller’s recipes call for 1 tablespoon per gallon of acid blend for persimmons, so I believe it is safe to add at least 1 tablespoon of acid blend. However, Keller’s recipes for banana – Jujube’s closest analogue when it comes to acidity at 5.15 – use citric acid instead of acid blend. This is unfortunate because I do not like to use straight citric acid in my wines because citric acid imparts a lemony flavor to wines. With watermelon, Keller’s recipes present the same dilemma: we are tasked with adding the juice of three limes to our wine, essentially citric acid in liquid form. But I do not have a way of converting citric acid to acid blend because I do not know the ratio.
The closest I can find to a prescription for acid blend (and not citric acid) for a fruit this insipid is Keller’s recipe for fig wine. But fig wine is not a direct analogue for jujube. In many ways, fig is in a class all its own when it comes to wine. Figs are extremely tannic, and very low acid. So if you are comparing fig to a grape wine, it would – with the addition of copious amounts of acid – make a very full bodied red wine analogue. But jujube doesn’t have the body to compare to a Cabernet Sauvignon. At most, it would compare to a light bodied red wine – think Gamay – but probably more like a rosé. So this matters because whites and rosés require more acid than full bodied reds, which would speak to adding a little more than the amount of acid from the fig wine recipe. On the other hand, figs tend to be even less acidic than Jujube, coming in at about 5.52, which would speak to adding a little less than the amount of acid from the fig wine recipe. Ultimately, I enjoy my wines pretty acidic because, to my palate, that makes them more “drinkable.” So I’m not really going to err on the side of caution here. Keller’s fig wine recipe calls for three and a half tablespoons, and that’s what I’m going to add to Jujube wine. I will test the pH and TA levels at first racking and adjust the recipe if it seems called for.
Which leaves, really, only tannins to account for. I’m not going to add any tannins prior to primary fermentation. I know that there are some amounts of tannin in the fruit. But I don’t think that the fruit is a heavy hitter when it comes to tannin content. Because of how difficult the seed is to separate from the flesh, however, I am going to be fermenting with the seeds in the must. If, as seems likely, the seeds are higher in tannin content than the flesh, then some tannins could leach out from the seed to the flesh. So I am going to taste at first racking and will adjust the tannin content accordingly.
This recipe has not been tried yet, but I did try a different recipe for dried jujube. And, while I was ultimately able to salvage that batch, I concluded that that recipe was not workable. It was incredibly labor intensive, so I’m going with a recipe that I believe will be much less work. Just be aware – if you make this wine – that this recipe has not been tried. It is, rather, an untested recipe that was cultivated based on what I learned from a previous recipe. I believe that it would make a nice wine, but I have not yet tried it. It’s still a beta release recipe.
One quick note is that I am lowering the alcohol content of my wines in future, with some notable exceptions. (Plum and fig can probably start from a gravity of 1.1, but no higher.) But with the lower body wines, I am coming around to the idea that you don’t really want to be above 12% ABV. So I’m going to shoot for around 1.09 gravity as a starting point for my wines. Jujube is no exception from what I’ve seen of it so far. This is a correction that I have made for this recipe, but the other recipes have not always been adjusted yet so if you are making another wine, you might want to consider starting from 1.09 or slightly above rather than my traditional target of 1.1. I think as they age it’s not as much of an issue, but one of the problems I have been having is young wines tasting harsh or “hot” and I think the issue is that the starting alcohol level is still a tad too high. I’m also going to start using the metric system more because I find that it’s easier to be much more precise with the metric system. However, with the smaller volume units (teaspoon, tablespoon, etc.) I will still use the imperial system because I don’t have a set of tools that enable me to efficiently measure out small metric volumes.
Recipe
- 1.2 kg dried Jujube
- 560 grams granulated sugar
- 1.25 tsp pectic enzyme
- 4.33 tsp acid blend
- 1 crushed campden tablet
- 4.75 liters water
- 1.25 tsp yeast nutrient
- 2 g d47 or Montrachet yeast (I will be trialing d47, but I believe Montrachet would work beautifully).
ADDENDUM: The results are in from my labor intensive version of jujube wine (not this recipe!) and it is phenomenal! This might very well be my favorite batch that I have ever made. It’s still very young, but even the very young jujube wine is incredible. So it might be worth the effort to fine tune this recipe. This fruit definitely has potential.
