Thanks Scott! When you're in our area, be sure to drop by for a fruit wine tasting!
Very cool. I judged a persimmon dry white that was excellent at our San Antonio Wine Guild Comp.
Folks don't know it but my area has gone big time with the vineyard ops and wineries, it's the Napa of the southwest. Must be a new vineyard and winery going in every month and a wine bistro or tasting room on every corner of town. You may have heard of Jack Keller who has a website and is in our guild. Jack has probably made wine out of everything. Rumor has it he even tried St. Augustine grass. Didn't like the vegetative taste. Here's some of his recipes. https://winemaking.jackkeller.net/recipes.asp
I have made more wines than Jack Keller and won more awards than Jack Keller. To date, I made more than 700 different kinds of wines. I started making wine when I was a kid in the tropics, and have access to much more diverse kinds of fruits that Jack Keller don't have access to. For example I made wines from Durian, Lipote, Baligang, Aratiles, Sineguelas, Karamay, Kamias, coffee fruits (the pulp, not the beans), cacao fruits (pulp, not the beans) ....
But when someone asks me about how to make wine, I always refer them to Jack Keller's website as a good starting point. Once they master that part of making wine and if they're still interested, I put them to the next level of winemaking.
Jack Keller's general winemaking can be summarized as a cane sugar wine flavored with hints of fruits. Most recipes use little amounts of fruits and almost all the alcohol are from cane sugar and diluted with lots of water. My purpose of making wine is to cram as much fruits into a bottle of wine. So I use between 3-6 lbs of fruits to a bottle of wine, while Jack's recipes uses the same amount of fruits to a gallon with added water and lots of cane sugar, and wine acids for balance. Jack Keller's recipes make delicious wines though, but it could be better more flavorful and aromatic if you had just used almost pure fruits with no added water especially if you're producing the fruits.