Learn how to make strawberry wine using fresh strawberries from the garden or frozen strawberries will work as well.
Strawberries are one of our favourite fruits that we grow here in our garden. If you’ve got lots of strawberry plants, here is a strawberry wine recipe for you to try! Just a couple of ingredients are needed to make this easy version of Strawberry wine.
This home made fruit wine is light and makes a nice dessert wine with a fruity flavor and taste. Before I get to the wine recipe though, I want to share just a little bit of information about how we grow our strawberries.
Since strawberry plants are a perennial fruit, they will die back in the fall, lay dormant over winter, then start growing again in the spring.
If your plants are treated right, you can grow a lot of huge strawberries every year. Read more about what you really need to do in order to grow big strawberries. There are some important pruning tips in that article, that will be of help.
We grow everbearing strawberries in a raised bed and because we use those tips every year, we grow lots of berries. Healthy, big juicy strawberries.
We eat lots of fresh berries and once we have had our fill, I start making Strawberry Freezer Jam. This recipe is an easy way to make homemade jam and I don’t even need to can it. I just store the jars in the freezer and pull one out as we need it.
When we have a banner berry growing year and I’ve made enough jam, we will make some homemade Strawberry wine from our strawberries. It’s fairly easy and the wine is tasty, light and fruity.
How to Make Strawberry Wine
You can use either fresh strawberries or frozen strawberries to make this home made wine. Since 5 cups of strawberries are needed to make one gallon of wine, I just pick ripe berries, measure my quantity, write a note on the ziplock bag and set it in the freezer.
The next time I pick, I again measure my berry harvest, add it to the same bag and make a note. Once I have 5 cups, I can get started on my small batch of berry wine.
This recipe makes a 1 gallon batch of Strawberry wine. If you want to make big batch Strawberry wine, just adjust the recipe accordingly.
Homemade Strawberry Wine Recipe
Weigh out a total of 5 pounds of strawberries. Wash the berries and hull them, so there is no stem, cap or leaves on the berry.
You can use either a crock or a fermenting bucket; add the berries to the container and, using a potato masher, mash them well.
(If you are using frozen berries, this part is much easier. You will find, as the berries thaw, they release a lot of liquid. Just mash as needed.)
You can also just set the frozen berries in a colander, above a large pot and let the berries thaw, straining the juice into the pan. Using this method means you will easily have removed all bits of the berries, leaving just the strawberry juice to be added to your fermenting container.
To the juice, add enough boiling water to have a total amount of liquid close to 1 1/3 gallon, roughly, it doesn’t need to be exact.
Adding Sugar to Strawberry Wine
Using your kitchen scale, weigh out 1 1/2 pounds of sugar and add it to the liquid in the primary fermenter, giving the mixture a really good stir. Leave it alone for 10 minutes to let it settle down from the stirring.
Now, evenly sprinkle 1/4 tsp of wine yeast nutrient across the top of the liquid; don’t stir it in. Cover the fermenter or crock and let it sit in a warm place. This will help the yeast start working, to get things fermenting.
Note: If you possibly can, set your primary at counter level. Then, later when you rack it down, you can easily rack it down into the jugs, which need to be at a lower level. If you need to move the primary at all, you will be disturbing all the sediment that has already settled to the bottom.
Every day, remove the lid and just vent off the liquid a bit by waving your hand over the top of the open fermenter. Then recover it until the next day.
Racking Wine
After one week, the wine is ready to be transferred to jugs (or if you are making a larger batch, transfer the wine down to a carboy). You can also use wide mouth mason jars with these special fermentation lids.
The transferring is called “racking”, as in you are racking it down from the primary fermenter into a secondary fermentation vessel.
Use a siphon hose like this one to easily rack the wine. Keep the hose off the bottom! This way, you will be leaving any sediment behind on the bottom of the primary fermenter. If you mashed the berries in this same container, there will be lots of berry bits, so try to leave these behind as well.
When the wine is racked, add a bung with an airlock with water in it. Leave it sit for at least one week before racking it again.
One of the primary purposes of racking is to leave the sediment behind. The wine will be racked several times over the next weeks and in the end we will be left with clear wine, which is exactly what we want.
We set the jugs on a table fairly close to the woodstove; you want the wine to be warm enough to continue fermenting.
When the wine stops fermenting (no more air bubbles forming and releasing in the airlock), leave it for another week. Then it is ready to bottle.
After bottling, set the wine in a cool dark place; we like to lay them on their sides. Leave them for at least six months before opening, but longer is better.
Strawberry Wine Questions and FAQ’s:
How much fruit do you need per gallon of wine?
For each gallon of wine, 5 pounds of fruit is required.
How many pounds of strawberries does it take to make 5 gallons of wine?
​To make 5 gallons of wine, you need to use 25 lbs of strawberries.
How do you store strawberry wine?
You can store your homemade strawberry wine at room temperature for up to one year. Before serving, you may want to put it in the fridge, as it is best served at a temperature between 7 – 9C, which is roughly 44 – 48 F.
Do I have to add Campden tablets to the wine?
You can, but we do not add Campden tablets to our strawberry wine.
More Wine Recipes:
Here are some of the other types of fruit wine that we make here, plus we’ve got vegetable wine and even a homemade flower wine!
Learn about wine you can make from your garden harvests.
This blended Saskatoon Raspberry wine is one we make every year; it’s a delicious red wine!
If you’re harvesting lots of Rhubarb, try this homemade Rhubarb wine!
This delicious Parsley wine has hints of citrus, thanks to the addition of an orange and a lemon.
Ever tried homemade Carrot wine? It’s light and yes, it tastes like carrots. It also has a bit of citrus added to it.
We make this Dandelion wine almost every year. Since we don’t spray our lawns at all, it’s perfectly fine to pick dandelion flowers to make this delicious light wine.
Learn more about the process of making wine.
originally published 2011; latest update January 2023
