Pomegranate Wine
If you’ve looked in the juice department of your local Costco you might have seen pomegranate juice for sale there, and perhaps wondered why anyone would pay so much for the stuff.
Apparently research has shown that daily consumption of the antioxidants in pomegranate juice may offer health benefits such as:
Heart Health – Studies in laboratory mice have show that consumption of pomegranate juice reduced the buildup of plaque in the lining of the inner artery. In fact, it reduced the size of atherosclerotic lesions by 44%.
Reduction of LDL (bad) Cholesterol – Studies in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition have shown that the antioxidants found in pomegranates reduce the LDL oxidation in mice, and help to lower blood pressure in hypertensive humans.
Neutralize Free Radicals – pomegranates contain antioxidants like Polyphenol. Antioxidants help repair damage done to the body’s cells by Free Radicals, (unstable oxygen molecules associated with cancer, heart disease and the effects of aging).
Improved Carotid Artery Health and Lower Blood Pressure in Patients with Carotid Artery Stenosis. Fight prostate cancer – Drinking 8 ounces of pomegranate juice daily may suppress prostate cancer activity in men with recurrent prostate cancer.
For more on boomer health discoveries go to:
http://www.boomer-books.com/health_page/healthpage.html
Making wine from fresh pomegranate can let you enjoy the health benefits of pomegranates and offer a slight buzz as well. Last weekend I was lucky enough to join a few friends in making 5 gallons of pomegranate wine. The pomegranates they grew were sweet, and a far cry from the bitter fruit I remember from my childhood in San Diego, CA where the trees grew wild and were foraged by young scavengers hunting for a quick meal.
The recipe for pomegranate wine:
20 lbs of pomegranates (remove and save the seeds— throw away the rest—best done underwater with a knife unless you want your kitchen colored with magenta colored spray.)
8 lbs of sugar
5 gallons of water
2 pints of grape concentrate (from a wine making store)
1/2 oz. of citric acid (from a wine making store)
1 tsp. of tannin (from a wine making store)
1 tsp. pectic emzyme (from a wine making store)
1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient (from a wine making store)
1 package of champagne yeast (from a wine making store)
4 camden tablets (from a wine making store)
A big bag made out of cheese-cloth.
A great place for wine-making supplies is http://www.homebrewit.com
Remove the seeds from the pomegranates. Place them in the cheese cloth bag. Then squeeze them, crush them, or mash them with a potato masher, being careful to save all of the juice as it will be the elixer of your brew.
Pour the juce into a 5-gallon glass bottle or tub, or food-approved plastic bucket. Add your bag of goodies (tie off the top first). Pour in your water and the pectic emzynes, grape concentrates, tannin, citric acid, yeast nutrient, but hold off on the yeast. Instead of yeast, crush yourself 4 camden tablets and stir the dust of those in last. They serve to kill all the mold, or bacteria that would want to make your brew a home and make it taste funky. Without this procedure you would be casting your fate to the wind, hoping that the wind blew in a “good” wild yeast and not a “bad” wild yeast.
If you have a hydrometer take your “starting gravity”. If not, say a small prayer.
Put a cover over the top and let your ingredients sit in the killing zone for the next 24 hours. When this time passes, the ingredients of your camden tablets will have turned your brew into a bacterial wasteland. Every living thing will be killed off. That when you mix your little packet of yeast with some water. Bring it back to life and stir this to your mix. You have given your yeast its own garden of Eden.
This action assures that your yeast will be the dominant life form on your new mini-planet. Mr. yeast eats the sugars in your mix and poops out alcohol. In a day or so you’ll start to see some activity. That’s good. Activity means that your yeast is hungry and happy. Nothing works up an appetite like being freeze-dried for a while. Don’t seal off your brew at this stage. It needs to let all that carbon dioxide out. You might want to cover it with a sheet of plastic to keep out bugs or curious onlookers.
In a week when things slow and it appears that your yeast is going to sleep you’ll need to siphon the liquid into a 5 gallon glass water bottle and place a fermentation lock on the top. If you don’t have a fermentation lock, don’t dispair. Your can use a cork with a hole in the middle for a hose (the same plastic hose you used for siphoning will work). Put one end of the hose into the cork in your bottle and run the other end under a small pan of water. If you are paranoid, you can seal your connections with sealing wax like we did in the 1960’s.
Now you can place your bottle in some dark corner with a stable temperature where you can forget about it. Recant to another bottle in 6 months. Bottle in 9 months when all activity has stopped.
November 13th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
i want to request to add about storing conditions and solutions to problems like bad smell and others in this page
November 15th, 2005 at 9:12 am
Hi Kisahan,
I hope that you want to add about storing conditions and bad smell of wine. As in wine making. If this is true—blog away! Enlighten us on the art of wine making.
While I am writing this, five gallons of tropical fruit mead is gurgelling in the carboy (a five-gallon water bottle with fermentation lock) behind me.
It was made with 10 lbs. of honey, 1-1/2 lbs. of sugar, 1 lb. of maple syrup, and 2 pineapples, 4 lbs of fresh tropical mexican creme guavas, 4 lbs. of bananas, and four mangoes. Four sticks of cinnamon and 4 chopped nutmegs. I used a liquid California Ale Yeast. Starting Gravity around 1100. It’s been fermenting for about a week now. I racked it to the carboy last night. This room smells pretty tropical. Perfect for enduring the onslaught of winter.
WARNING: This is an experimental wine and may turn out bad—but so far, so good. Only time will tell. If you want to keep tabs on it, I’ll gladly bore you with more details.
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:24 pm
hi
i want to know about the flavoure of the wine
how was it/
and what can we do to enhance the quality more
thank you.
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:45 pm
Hi Nitin,
Thanks for asking!
So far so good. We just siphoned the pomegranate wine into another 5-gallon bottle and took time to take a hydrometer reading and to sample a small amount.
We siphoned it into another 5-gallon glass bottle to leave the sediment behind. Hopefully, this process helps the wine separate from the sediment which contains dead yeast particles that can effect the flavor. Also, this process helps the wine to clear from the fruit sediments.
At this time, the wine is the color of a dark rose. It measures in at 13% alcohol and while a little rough around the edges, it’s pretty tasty! A lot better than what we had expected. It tastes like a rose—but with the fruit smell of pomegrante. I expect it will get only better with another 6-months to 1-year of more aging. I can’t think of anything to enhance it at this point. Plus there are other people involved and if I mess with it, they may become upset—especially if I screw it up.
To help with the waiting process I started a mead (honey-wine) described in my post above—using fruit like guavas, pineapples, mangos, and bananas. I used an ale yeast for this instead of a wine yeast. The ale yeast, while it has a lower alcohol tolerance is suppose to help the mead-wine mature faster. Right now this 5-gallon batch is aging in my garage refridgerator. It appears like a light wine. It tastes pretty exotic and measures out to around 9.5% alcohol. I’m not completely sure how it will finish out since I can’t seem to stop mucking with it. To fill the five gallon up to the top, I added water that had been used to create jasmine green tea and lemon grass, so I may have screwed it up at the last minute.
I’ve just picked 15 lbs of really ripe and smelly tropical phillipine guavas this morning, and I have a batch of bananas truning black, so it looks as though I’ll be brewing another batch of honey-fruit wine. This time I’ve bought a proper wine yeast and I plan on using some grape extract and raisins to make this batch have grape flavors as well. If you’ve interested, let me know and I’ll write you the grisley details of this latest adventure in brewing.
December 12th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
I’ve just finished the third batch of wine here and the recipe is:
10 lbs. of honey (Costco)
2 Mangoes
10 lbs. of really ripe tropical Phillipine guavas (from backyard tree)
3 cans of frozen Welches white grape juice (from supermarket)
1 bottle of concentrated grape juice (from a wine supply store)
1 can of frozen orange juice (from supermarket)
2 cans of apple/passion fruit juice (from supermarket)
1 small pineapple (supermarket)
5 lbs. of bananas (supermarket)
Juice of 5 limes (backyard)
2 lbs of fresh grapes (supermarket)
3 ripe ruby red grapefruits (backyard)
4 teaspoons of acid blend (from wine supply store)
2 teaspoons of tannin (wine supply store)
2 teaspoons of Pectic enzyme (wine supply store)
For this batch I used a real liquid wine yeast “Steinberg-Geisenheim” availablefor that German wine flavor, to help complement the grapes. Supposedly, this yeast supplies many “fruity” flavors to the finished wine.
It sure is supplying “fruity” flavors to the room that it’s brewing in. I imagine that this wine will take longer to age as it’s much more complex.
But it sure makes winter a lot more enjoyable when you have a exotic smell bubbling up in your office. I suppose that summer will be more enjoyable also as we try the taste tests of these brews.
February 5th, 2006 at 7:13 am
Just tasted the pomegranate wine. Had to add benonite (a powdered clay for clearing wines) and recant it several times to remove sediment. It is now a beautiful orange color and the taste has improved dramatically!
All this in four months! I imagine it will be fantastic in another four months.
February 15th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Is the grape concentrate necesary when making pomegranate wine,and why? Isn’t the final product a pomegranate/grape wine? Ray…
February 16th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Hi Ray, good question.
White grape concentrate—whether from the frozen food section of the grocery store, or the highly concentrated version from a wine supply store, if often used in fruit wines as a substance to induce “body” into the wine.
I’m certainly not an expert at winemaking, but the small amount of concentrate added to the pomegranate mixture didn’t alter the taste or smell of the wine. The finished product clearly smells and tastes like pomegranate.
We also added sugar (quite a lot of it) yet, we wouldn’t call the finished product pomegranate/cane sugar wine. If the amount of grape concentrate were greater so that it began to influence the smell and taste of the wine I think I’d agree with you. There is probably a point at which the percentage of mixture warrants a space in the title of the wine, but I’m too ignorant on the subject to guess at this. Maybe someone out there reading this can help.
July 31st, 2006 at 6:29 am
this is the great source of pomegranate wine information, if you want to get it in South Carolina. Pomegranate wine is available in Earth Fare (Columbia, Greenville, Charleston and Mt. Pleasant)
April 7th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
There is a 100% Pomegranate Wine from Isreal named Rimon. They have a special process that enhances the sweetness in the Pomegranate so extra suger is not needed in the fermenttion process. I had some and I must say, it was as tasty as a fine Cabernet. They also sell a dessert wine which is fabulous. Considering how much it cost to make, it retails for $29 which is a bargain.
September 25th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
If you would like to trya Pomegranate wine without having to make it try Sweet Carolina Pomegrante ($10.00 retail) made by Chatham Hill Winery in North Carolina. Their link is http://www.chathamhillwine.com
Yummy!
October 21st, 2007 at 1:05 am
thanks for good tips. is it worth to add wheat while making wine?milind
December 15th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
This is an excellent article (Pomegranate Wine), I was searching for wine making supply on Yahoo and stumbled on this Saturday.
December 22nd, 2007 at 12:22 am
Hi Dan,
I tried Rimon they are good but $48 fora 750ml is steep, do you know any good pomegrate wines comparable to them but half their price.
December 22nd, 2007 at 12:46 am
Hi Seth,
Can you give me the website for buying good pomegrate wines.
Yash
December 31st, 2007 at 12:58 pm
i want detalis of pomegranate wine prduction for different varieties of pomegranate
December 31st, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Hey, I found the site with a quick search for “pomegranate wines” after an interesting discovery:
Having returned to my parents house for a Christmas visit, I noticed that a couple of ‘handles’ of POM brand Pomegranate juice were in our rather cool garage refrigerator. Their date, unsurprising to me, made it clear that they remained from the the last time I had visited – July 2006. They were unopened so, curious, I unscrewed one, poured it in a crystal glass and took a sip. The result was a still slightly sweet, but definitively (if mildly) alcoholic-tasting beverage with a light, pleasant carbonation. As a biologist, I’m aware of the disagreeable effects of wood-alcohols (methanol) and I can’t say just how much there was in my haphazard elixir, but I have yet to experience any ill effects and find I quite enjoy my little ‘sparkling wine.’ It is no proper wine, never mind a spumante or champagne, but I like it.
So, for the curious, stick a large container of Pom in a fridge (it happened ours was well away from sun) and let it sit unopened for a year and half. You might be pleasantly surprised.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Also, more a related note on pomegranates and antioxidants. Many of the studies examining the antioxidant effects of pomegranate juice constituents found much better results in extracts of the fermented juice. Indeed, many pomegranate based supplements are derived from fermented juice rather than fresh. So if you’re looking to fend off chromosome-crashing free radicals with your pom, pomegranate wines and the like are the way to go (plus they’re just more fun to-boot).
May 7th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Hi, I was going to try some pomegranate wine but didn’t get around to it last fall when I had fruit. I have some juice concentrate that is 100% natural with no additives and am thinking it might do (juice of 64 fruit). Any comments?
August 29th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Has anybody tried making pomegranite wine from just the juice, no water or sugar added, like when making cider or a grape wine?