How to make Ginger Wine at Home

Ginger Wine for Christmas

With Christmas barely a month away, let’s see how to make some super delicious ginger wine using my quick and easy recipe. We’ll need just a handful of ingredients and the wine will take under two weeks to ferment and be ready in time for Christmas!

The first thing you’ll have to do is sanitise all your equipment  – the containers, utensils, spoons, your strainer, funnel….  wash everything with warm soapy water, and finally rinse everything twice or thrice with boiling hot water and then let the equipment dry. And go ahead and sterilise whatever you can. That would be even better. You have to take these precautions to keep your wine from getting contaminated during the process of making it.

This wine has a shorter fermentation period of just 12 days and a lower alcohol content of maybe around 10 – 12% v/v. For a full-strength ginger wine, you’ll have to let it ferment for around 20 days.

A few other delicious Christmas recipes for you to check out like my crunchy assorted Christmas cookies, Christmas neuries / karanjis, and of course, my last-minute Christmas cake.

Ingredients

1 ¼ litres water

100g ginger, roughly crushed

80g raisins, chopped

3 cloves

4 cardamoms

1 one-inch cinnamon stick

Zest of ½ sour lime

Zest of ½ orange

320g (1 ½ cup) brown sugar

½ tsp citric acid

Juice of 1 sour lime

Juice of 1 orange

¼ tsp yeast

Procedure

1. Scrape the skin off the ginger, wash it well, and then roughly crush it with a pestle and mortar.
2. Roughly chop the raisins.
3. Scrape the zest off half the orange and half of the sour lime. And then, extract the juice from the sour lime and the orange.
4. Set the water to boil on high heat. To it, add the ginger, raisins, the spices, the zest of the orange and sour lime, and the sugar. Stir everything well and bring the water to a boil. When it starts boiling, reduce the heat to medium-low and let mixture continue boiling for half an hour.
5. Stir in the citric acid and turn off the heat. Let the mixture cool to room temperature.
6. Add the orange juice and lime juice and give the mixture a stir. If you strain the mixture at this stage, through a strainer lined with a muslin cloth or cheese cloth you could enjoy it as non-alcoholic ginger ‘wine’. You could drink this chilled or warm.
7. To make the traditional ginger wine however, you have to ferment this mixture by adding in the yeast. First, pour the mixture into a glass or ceramic jar. You could also use a plastic jar instead. If you’re using instant dry yeast, add it directly to the mixture. But if you’re using active dry yeast, bloom it first in a little warm water along with ½ tsp sugar. Give it around 10 minutes to bloom and then stir it into the ginger mixture. There should be around 2 inches of breathing space above the level of the mixture because as it ferments, carbon dioxide will be released from it.
8. Cover the mouth of the jar with a clean cloth, securing it with a rubber band or string. Place the lid of the jar over the cloth but don’t tighten it. If you’re using a transparent glass or plastic jar, cover it completely with a thick kitchen towel, because it should be kept away from light during the fermentation process. Set the jar in a safe, preferably dark place and leave it undisturbed for the next 7 days.
9. Strain the wine through a strainer lined with a muslin cloth or cheesecloth into a clean and dry jar. Put the lid on the jar and let the wine settle for 5 days during which time a fine sediment will settle at the bottom of the wine. Siphon off the clear wine into a clean and dry wine bottle. You could also decant and carefully filter the wine through a strainer. Discard the sediment. Chill the wine and enjoy it with your Christmas dinner. (The alcohol content will be a little low (10 – 12%) because the wine needs around 18 to 20 days to ferment some more and become stronger.

Enjoy!