As always, this recipe is for 1.25 gallons, which reduces to 1 gallon. Pumpkin is a finicky wine because it’s difficult for the yeast to get inside the fruit – it’s very fibrous – and there are a ton of starches that the yeasts can’t really do much with. These starches will make your wine cloudy and give it some off flavors. So we are going to do a couple things that we don’t normally do. First, it’s actually ok to cook the pumpkin lightly (cooking fruit is normally a very bad idea for wine). But we can actually freeze it to accomplish a little bit of the same thing, and that’s the option I went with because I just can’t bring myself to cook any of my wine ingredients. What we are trying to do is destroy those cells to give the yeast access to the interior of the fruit. Some people cook it. Some people freeze it. And some people grate it to reduce the surface area. It’s all being done for the same purpose: to get the yeast water in contact with the sugars and starches in the interior of the pumpkin.
The second thing we are going to do is use amylase enzyme. I don’t usually like to use amylase enzyme because most fruits aren’t heavy in starches, but a pumpkin has more starch than sugar, so the amylase enzyme will convert those starches to sugars so the yeast can work with them.
- 6.25 pounds frozen pumpkin flesh – skin on (you can remove the skin, but it will help give your wine a nice color)
- 2 lb, 6 oz sugar
- 1.5 tsp amylase enzyme
- 1.5 tsp pectic enzyme
- 2.5 tsp acid blend
- 1/3 tsp tannin
- 2 tsp yeast nutrient
- 1.25 gallons filtered water
- 1 campden tablet
- 2 g wine yeast (preferably a white wine or Champaign yeast with at least 13% alcohol tolerance). Although I intended to trial d47 yeast, when it actually came time to add the yeast I took the conservative approach and used Premier Cuvee. Premier Cuvee is Red Star’s version of EC-1118. It may be identical (this is my belief). Or it may be slightly different, but they are extremely similar if not identical. Both will do a nice, clean, easy ferment. The downside is that they don’t really add much to the wine because they are very neutral, flavorwise.
Cut the pumpkins and remove the seeds. I used about 3 pie pumpkins. Then cube the pumpkin flesh with the skin on, and put the pumpkin cubes in freezer bags. Freeze the pumpkin for about two days. Then thaw at room temperature.
Boil your water and dissolve your sugar into it. When it has come back down to room temperature, add the water to your primary fermentation vessel. Add your amylase enzyme and your pectic enzyme to the water. Crush a campden tablet, and put it into your water. Add the acid blend and the tannin and the wine nutrient. Then stir everything together. Place your pumpkin cubes in a food grade nylon bag, then add that to your primary fermentation vessel. Wait 24 hours.
After 24 hours, pitch your yeast. Allow the batch to ferment for at least three days and possibly up to two weeks. The average is between 3 to 5 days at room temperature. You are waiting for your brew to get to below 1.03 specific gravity. You don’t want the fermentation to be too vigorous, but you don’t want it to be completely over either when you move to your secondary fermentation vessel. The key thing is that you want some fermentation to be going on because the CO2 will push the oxygen out of the headspace in your secondary fermentation vessel, in combination with the airlock protecting your wine from oxidation in secondary.
I like to let it sit about a month, to really let all those tiny pieces of fruit and dead yeast cells fall to the bottom, then I like to rack exactly once off the lees, top off my secondary fermentation vessel to the neck, and then toss any extra wine. (Or else you can often drink it…it will be young and kind of harsh at this point, but there’s a decent chance it is drinkable. Fig probably won’t be drinkable, or quince, but the others should be drinkable, albeit a little rough around the edges.) Wait a year while the wine sits in the secondary fermentation vessel, then bottle it. Of course, check every few weeks to make sure that your airlock still has some liquid in there (if it’s the S type) and to monitor its progress. If it isn’t crystal clear by the six month period, you can consider adding more pectic enzyme and possibly more amylase enzyme to help clarify. But I dislike fining agents. Time and enzymes should be all you need to produce crystal clear wine.
After the fact reflections:
There is much more water in the pumpkin than I assumed. I think, because pumpkin doesn’t seem “juicy” that I assumed that the water content was fairly low. But I ended with close to two gallons, when I only planned for 1.25.
But, I haven’t decided whether this is a bad thing or not. One way of handling this would be to adjust the water down. Perhaps something like Jack Keller’s traditional “7 pints” would actually be the right amount of water to add. But I’m still trying to decide whether I like it this way or not. The starting gravity was 1.1, but that was before all the water leached out during the fermentation. Some basic math can help us determine what the alcohol level of the pumpkin wine is. Pumpkin is – max – about 10 grams of sugar per 245 grams, so about 4%. We started with 6.25 pounds, or 100 ounces, meaning that there are only about 4 ounces of sugar from the pumpkin. Almost all of the sugar that is in the wine was added by me. There are 38 ounces of sugar that I added, and ~4 ounces from the pumpkin. That adds up to 42 ounces of sugar – 2 pounds, 10 ounces – in two gallons of volume.
So if we divide by 2, there is 1 pound, 5 ounces of sugar per gallon. I haven’t taken a gravity reading yet, but since we used Premier Cuvee yeast, it’s a pretty good bet that all of that sugar will eventually be converted to alcohol. My specific gravity chart says that 1 pound 5 ounces of sugar per gallon converts to about 7.5% ABV. That is a lot less than I normally make.
But here’s the thing: It’s working! When I taste the pumpkin wine, my first reaction is “Oh no! This is too light on the alcohol!” But my second reaction is, “Actually, this is good, though.” So I haven’t decided whether I want to adjust the water levels down. Maybe I’m ok with having a low-ish ABV wine. But just a caveat emptor, don’t use the recipe unless you are ok with ~7.5% ABV finished product.
It’s surprisingly good! My expectations for this wine were fairly low at the outset. I just wanted to see what happened. Now, I’m thinking about tweaking the next batch. And I want to see how it all sorts out because a lot of work may be being done by the “almost 2 gallons” claim. In reality, it’s somewhat under 2 gallons. If pumpkin is 90% water – as I believe it is, surprisingly! – and if I added 6.25 pounds of pumpkin, then the reality is that I added about 10 cups of water. Now, ten cups is five pints, or about 5/8 of a gallon. And this would mean that there was, not two gallons, but 1.875 gallons. That sounds like “almost” two gallons. But the math works out to a significantly higher ABV because the ratio works out to 1 pound, 6.5 ounces per gallon instead of 1 pound, 5 ounces. That extra ounce and a half per gallon may not sound like a lot, but it ends up getting us to about 8.1% ABV. Now, there’s a big difference between an 8.1% ABV sweet wine, and an 8.1% ABV dry wine. I’m still tasting some residual sweetness, but that very well may go away once the wine is finished. But the solution, much as I am loathe to backsweeten (given my preference for off-dry wines), might just be to make this a semi-sweet, low alcohol wine.
