Getting More Fruit Flavor In The Fruit Wine (Part I)

Hello,
I have made some peach wine and apricot wine from my orchard.  I would like for them to taste a little more like peach or apricot.  Suggestions?
Thanks
Darlene
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Good Morning Darlene,
Since these wines have already been made we have to look at things we can do to them irrespective of the wine recipes used to make them. This pretty much narrows the options down to direct flavoring adjustments or flavoring enhancement.
One of the wine making products we have that can be used to enhance a wine’s flavor is our liqueur flavorings. These are flavorings that are intended to be mixed with plain vodka to instantly make anything from an orange brandy to peppermint schnapps. We have had great success with using them to enhance various fruit wine recipes.
The brand is called Top Shelf Liqueur Flavorings. They come in very small bottles, but pack a very big punch of flavor to a fifth of vodka. I would suggest adding the Apricot Brandy and the Peach Schnapps flavorings respectively to your wines.
You should need no more than one bottle to 5 gallons of wine. You may want to only add half a bottle to start out with and see how that goes. Make sure the flavor enhancer gets blended thoroughly when adding. Then let the wine sit overnight before bothering with sampling a taste. For some reason it seems that these flavorings need to mingle a bit with the wine before their full flavor comes into fruition.
A second way to enhance your wine recipes is to sweeten the wine. Many wines loose their fruitiness as they become drier from the fermentation. Dry essentially means lack of sweetness. By adding back sweetness before bottling, you can often bring back the fruitiness of the wine.
A third way to enhance your wine recipes is to both sweeten and enhance the wine at the same time by adding frozen concentrate to them. For your two wines in particular, you could use peach and apricot frozen concentrates–the same stuff you get at the grocery store.
It is important to note that if you do add any kind of sugar/sweetener to the wine, you will also need to add another one of our wine making products, Potassium Sorbate, to keep the wine from re-fermenting and becoming dry again.
Happy Wine Making
Customer Service
Watch for my next blog post (Part II) where I will explain how you can tweak your wine recipes to get the most fruit flavor you can in them even before you add the yeast.
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.