How to Make Wine | Making Fig Wine | Primary Fermentation 

Thank you so much Scott! We started making wine just a few years ago as well and have become addicted to it lol. We have a lot of fruit trees and make wine with the fruit we grow. It is exciting when we have a new fruit wine to try. :)

Woohoo!! Glad to hear it turned out well for you. Cheers! 🍷

The brew bags are a real pain the tail! We learned the hard way with not taking acidity into account with one of our batches early on. For us it wasn't a matter of tasting the problem, but the mold growing in one of the primary fermenters! That got our attention pretty quick and we have been measuring for it ever since. Glad this one is going well for you and fingers crossed you guys will enjoy the end product!

Glad you enjoyed this one and found it useful!

Just started a fig wine last week. Thanks for the tip about adding acidity. I went with lime juice, and so far its tasting nice! Getting ready to move to secondary soon. 😊​@HealthyFarmLiving

Hey Daniel. Thanks for the comment and encouragement. It's always great to hear from you!

Hey Randy. This is one of our favorite wines and a great way to use up those figs that none of us can seem to eat all of. We've found the key is getting the back sweetening right as you need some sweetness to bring the delicate fig flavor out of the wine.

Glad you enjoyed this video. We actually still have this sitting in the secondary waiting to bottle, so the next episode should be out soon...Assuming we find some time to get it done!

This is one of our all time favorite fruit wines Bryan. The key to this, as with most fruit wines, is a good amount of back sweetening. It really brings out the honey characteristics that are usually found in fresh figs. Here's to raising a glass to this one soon!

@@HealthyFarmLiving Why do most fig recipes add sugar? Could you strain figs and reduce the liquid for higher sugar content to keep the wine just figs? Also is there a benefit to beginning the process with the fruit intact (in pieces) vs utilizing just the liquid?

@@bryanchuchta8293 I think the primary reason is the very low water content that is naturally occurring in figs. Given wine is mainly water, the addition of liquid is necessary for the right consistency (hence the need to add sugar). Is it possible to condense enough figs to come out with a viable amount of liquid for wine? Maybe, but we have not attempted it. Fig skins, especially from brown/black figs, contain tannins and polyphenols that are key components in wine. They help to comprise the color and body of the finished wine

Glad you enjoyed this one Muah!

Good catch on those bananas! We don't typically have any issues with fruit flies, at least not in the house. When we do get a few it's usually in the compost bucket, so we stay on top of taking that out daily. I can only assume it's the extremely dry weather.

We don't heat anything once we start fermentation and generally we don't heat anything here at all. However, some folks find heating up the fruit to help with juice extraction before fermentation is useful. Heating would initially kill any yeast and should kill any bacteria. As for natural yeast, we have attempted that with figs before and have found we get mold before we get anything else in the fermentation. Also, you don't know what kind of yeast you're dealing with and it may not be able to handle the alcohol content you're attempting. Lastly, yeasty imparts specific characteristics in the finished wine. With an known yeast you know that that will be.

The initial specific gravity reading was 1.120 and this was fully attenuated, so our estimated ABV was just under 16%. We do back sweeten our fig wines, so the actual ABV would be lower than that with the addition of the simple syrup. Unfortunately, we don't have a way of measuring what the actual ABV is of the wine being poured out of the bottle due to the back sweetening.

Glad you enjoyed this one Tamra!

We usually give the Camden tablets at least 12 hours (preferably 24) before adding any yeast. This gives it a chance to off gas, so you're not killing off your wine yeast.

Great question Timothy. It all depends on the amount of alcohol we're looking for. We don't follow a specific "recipe" when we make our wines and like to adjust the alcohol content based on the type of fruit. For example, we've learned delicate tasting wines (like peach) do much better with lower alcohol content as the subtle flavor gets lost with heavy alcohol. In our experience, fig wines do well with a bit more alcohol, so we're looking for a specific gravity in the sugar water of around 1.122 - 1.125. Since figs don't have much water content, mixing that with the figs won't reduce that by much in the final product.

It eases the racking and re-racking process by keeping the smaller pieces out of the must and secondary fermenter. Figs in particular don't have much in the way of juice, so it doesn't help much to break them down very far.

Hey Alex, glad you're enjoying the content. We're big fans of fig wine as well and it takes quite a few figs to give a solid end product. Most of the figs you see us using here are from our late season and they are typically not very good tasting as they never ripen fully because of the cooler weather. However, once they're frozen and thawed they still create a very good, figgy flavored base for the wine, so I think it's still worth giving these a shot. As for fermentation, it's not critical that your wine ferments as fast as you see ours here. However, we do prefer a fully attenuated (no sugar remaining) wine and a strong initial fermentation ensures we get all of that sugar converted by the second racking.

@@HealthyFarmLiving I see. Thanks so much for the reply! I'll be taking the figs out of the freezer this evening and start brewing them tomorrow. I do the same thing as you, ferment to dryness and then back-sweeten, but prefer lower temperature and slightly slower fermentation...it supposedly preserves more flavor, but that depends more on the yeast strain. The champagne yeast I use works best at 18-22°C or 65-70° Fahrenheit. It's the French Bayanus strain. That said, our house is warmer than that even now, and I have both of the yeasts from your video so I'll do something different and duplicate your process, including mixing the yeast... something I've never done before. Again, thanks a bunch!

@@alexlarsen6413 be sure to let us know how this one does for you!

Hey Dana! For the primary fermentation we use one of a few different size buckets (6.5 gallon and 5 gallon), but the one in this video is a larger one we bought on Amazon some time ago. I'll link to it here for you; amzn.to/3b2Ji1r For smaller batches we use either a 6.5 or 5 gallon, food grade bucket. Nothing special on that one as we leave the lid slightly open during primary to allow the CO2 to easily escape. Good luck with your wine making adventures!

Now that is a GREAT suggestion!

You're really going to enjoy this wine. We've found that aging is key to balancing the flavors, so we prefer to give it at least a year to age before cracking the bottle. As for freezing, we usually hard freeze figs that are laid out flat on cookie sheets before bagging them. Normal flash-freezing (less than an hour) doesn't always get them hard enough to stay separate once you've bagged them.

@@HealthyFarmLiving please explain what flash freezing means. Can I put the whole figs in the freezers or do I cut in half? Thank you

@@patrickbrooks5912 oh sure. So you can leave them whole or cut them if you want, but you'll want to place them in a single layer on a flat baking sheet. Place them in the freezer for about an hour and then place them in a ziplock freezer bag. This way they should be frozen enough so they don't get stuck together in a single clump, but frozen as individual pieces of fruit. Depending on the size of the fruit and how cold your freezer is you may need a little more or less time to get this accomplished.

Hey Michael. The only issue we had was with our first batch of fig wine. With that, we didn't add the appropriate amount of acid to help ensure we didn't see any bacteria or in our case mold occurring on the secondary fermentation. I wouldn't be able to say for sure, but since then we've been using PH strips to test for it and have not had any issues.

Hey there Lottie! We don't have a catalog, but we can get you our fig wine recipe. Our email address is on the About Tab here on RU-vid, so shoot us an email and we'll give that to you.

Hey Kenny! We don't currently sell our wine, although we've had a lot of folks as us to. The process to gain a license to produce and sell wine is pretty extensive and we're not sure we'll have the capacity to do that along with everything else we do here on the farm. We may sample some on future farm tours, so be sure to check out our farm channel and subscribe to our customer email list on our website so you know when those will be taking place.

Hey Mathew, great question. The 2 main reasons we prefer not to blend these are during the straining process and the first re-racking. If you have smaller pieces of fruit when you're trying to strain into the secondary it's very difficult to get the excess fruit strained out of the liquid. This leads to the second issue of additional sediment when you re-rack because invariably you wind up with more small pieces of fruit in the secondary. If you check out our re-racking video you'll see just how much sediment is created with this wine. Because you want to leave as much of that sediment as possible behind you wind up losing quite a bit of wine along with it. In the end, it's not necessarily going to hurt the wine to have it, but we have found it makes these 2 steps easier if we don't.

@@HealthyFarmLiving You were right, Not a single piece of green skin should go in! BLEGH, will have to wait till next year.

Great question Tom. We have used a blender in the past and found that the racking is much more difficult when you have fractional pieces vs larger ones. Otherwise you would be fine to use a blender as well.

Hey Randal! So true on that test. I imagine this bottle in 1 shot would be a bit challenging on the liver!

That's for sure!