Lychees and Elderberries

At long last, we're making lychee wine.  My winemaking schtick originally was that I would grow the majority of the primary ingredient in each wine.  I've loosened that up a bit, and now the idea is that I grow an important portion of the primary ingredient in each wine.  I think this qualifies.

It took a bit of driving around with Shawn and Suzanne, but last weekend we found some canned lychee at an Asian market in Columbia.  My harvest this year was only about 15 fruit, but they are large, delicious 'Sweetheart' lychees, now frozen.

Lychee wine recipe

6 20oz cans of lychee

8oz fresh frozen 'Sweetheart' lychee

1 liter WGC

900g sugar

3/4t Fermaid K

1t GoFerm

3/4t tannin

4t pectic

1.5t citric acid

1.5t tartaric acid

QA23 yeast

6g bentonite

Add together the canned lychee, WGC, tannin, acids, sugar, and pectic.  Allow to sit 12-24 hours.  Check and adjust SG and pH/acid.  Rehydrate and pitch yeast.  Bentonite day 3.  Carboy when around 1.010.  Rack off gross lees after 1-2 weeks.  Rack at 30 days.  Thaw and lightly chop frozen lychees and add to carboy.  Rack again at 30 days and usual care thereafter.

This is basically the approach I took with my passionfruit wine...a "secondary infusion."  The lychee pH was 3.24 but TA a little low at 3.  I think my new WGC has less acid buffer than the old because the last two batches of wine needed far less acid to get to desired pH.  OG was fine at 1.080.  It may need a little more citric acid, we'll judge that after the third racking.  I moved it to the carboy after 6 days.

*****

Allie will be home next weekend from her internship in Washington, DC.  It will be great to hear more details about her adventure.  She enjoys being around people as passionate as she is.  

She will be home just in time to 1) sample last year's elderberry wine and 2) pick some more elderberries.  My elderberries have started to ripen and I have a few handfuls in the fridge.  But our big pickin' spot doesn't have too many ripe berries yet.

Last night Lisa and I popped open the first bottle of 2014 elderberry, batch 3.  Lisa was concerned about how many bottles we would have.  Between the four batches we have about 120 bottles of elderberry from last year so we were safe, in my judgment, opening a bottle last night. 

This wine is very good, just really young.  The color is terrific, so purple it has almost a blue color at times in the glass.  It is a little tart, and a little green peppery.  The tannin adjustments were right on.  I believe and hope this wine will settle down, the fruit will come forward in another several months.

Breaking convention, we had drank the elderberry with cedar-smoke-grilled chinook salmon and a mango-fennel-avocado salad.  Cheers!