There is surprisingly little out there on making mulberry (Morus spp.) wine given their abundance and that I think it makes a very passable light red. Perhaps it is because they aren’t as common in the fruit wine heartlands of the northern hemisphere like England and America (English language ones at least).
Hank Shaw (blogger and author of Hunt, Gather, Cook) takes his foraged winemaking pretty seriously and has a couple of recipes that could work for mulberries if you add some extra acidity (perhaps a meld of his elderberry and raisin wine recipes here would work. Jack Keller, of the American country winemaking online bible, has some mulberry wine recipes but doesn’t rave about it (see here). Don’t be put off though, because for one thing he is talking about the American red mulberry (Morus rubra), which I suspect doesn’t carry as much body as the black mulberry (Morus nigra).
Frederick Beech’s book Homemade Wines, Syrups and Cordials suggests using blackberry wine recipes, but I think this will still leave the low acidity unaddressed. Gloria Oxford’s Australian Make Your Own Wine has a recipe that is fairly standard (which for her includes adding some tannic and citric acid at the start), with the exception of also adding some red grape juice concentrate to increase the body. In my view if you are going to do this (unless you wake up in Prohibition-era America when it was at the heart of home winemaking), you might as well skip it at the fermenting stage and blend with a shop-bought red wine if you still feel it lacks oomph at the end – don’t knock until you’ve tried it; I think that you can often blend a homemade country wine with a bought grape wine and do better than either on their own.
Accepting that there is a low acidity issue to address, but still knowing from past years that a black mulberry wine can be great, I have had success with two different starting blends. One is to save up frozen mulberries until autumn and then blend with the sometimes excessive body of an elderberry wine (and last year, the meager handful of foraged blackberries I came up with). For now though, with my last big mulberry harvest possibly behind me for the year, it is time for the Spring wine: Mulberries given some added acidity and flavour by the other Spring favourites of rhubarb, strawberries and lemon.
Even the simplest country wines are blends in their own way, even if just by a few additions of lemon for citric acid, a cup of black tea for tannin or a handful of sultanas for yeast support (these are genuinely orthodox ingredients). Complexity is a sought after thing in wine; blending is how you get it and very much at the heart of the art and experimental adventure of it in country wine. If you want the ingredient and winemaking in pure form, eat mulberries and buy a Pinot Noir.
Equipment
2 demijohns (4.5 litres each) with airlock fitted corks, and 1 extra demijohn for racking (you can use other options with big jars, big bottles, buckets covered with cloth, or adjusted volumes in other brewing vessels, but a demijohn or three from a brewing shop (or second hand) are worth getting); a really big pot or two; a funnel (I’m still on plastic but stainless steel would be better for sterilising); bottles and lids for 9 litres (swing tops, beer bottles if you have a crown sealer, wine bottles if you have corks and a corker or want to try sterilising used screw caps).
Sterilising
You can get powders to add to water for sterilizing but I have come around to thinking that everything can, and should, be done with boiling water – any contrary view is just in the absence of a big enough pot or the presence of too much plastic.
Ingredients
The amounts partly come down to a feeling for what will make a good mix and the amounts that the Spring yielded. Below is not a recipe in the normal sense because you would inevitably have different ingredients. This was for 2 demijohns to ferment at the same time, so 1 batch would be half quantities
2.5kg mulberries, which comprised:
1100g fresh mulberries;
750g frozen mulberries;
650g mulberry skins (a by-product of making the cordial, sharab el toot)
400g rhubarb, sliced;
200g strawberries;
Zest and juice of 3 lemons;
6 litres of preservative free apple juice (you can just use water with extra sugar, but I have taken to basing all my berry fruit wines on apple juice these days)
1kg white sugar (this the simplest, rawest stuff for yeast to work on)
400 g honey (honey is a mix of glucose, fructose and sucrose and is harder to work easily as the sole sugar source for the yeast to make alcohol from, hence blending with the other sugars; honey also tends to make the wine need more aging for some reason);
200g palm sugar (because it was there and I have successfully used it in higher proportions before);
Good wine yeast (not ale yeast, lager yeast, baker’s yeast or anything other than a wine yeast; you can mail-order it online)