It may seem strange but it is very good possible to make wine from jam. I make this wine every year. It is a lovely rose for a nice sunny day. Drink it cold.
The wine should be aged about one year. If you drink it too early it will taste like alcoholic strawberry juice. After one year it is a well-balanced wine. You can still taste strawberry but it is not as strong.
I have made it with oak chips and tannin before. I thought it would make it into a more sophisticated wine with some different flavors and mouth feel but this was not an improvement. Since that experiment I do not use these additions anymore in white wines. I prefer white wines and rose to be fresh and young.

How to make it.

For 25 liter wine I use 20 jars of jam. Sterilize your fermenter with citric acid and sulphite.
Put the jam in the fermenter. Rinse the jars and add some water.
Stir plenty pectoenzymes through the jam. Pectoenzymes break down pectine so the jam becomes more fluid. (I use much more than the instruction mention)
Close the lid and continue the next day.

Dissolve 67 gram citric acid, and a teaspoon of yeast nutrition in some water and add it to the jam.

The jam contains 5670 gram of sugar which is enough to create approximately 12,5 % alcohol in the wine. No additional sugar is needed.

Add the dried yeast to some lukewarm water and let it stand for 15 minutes. Let the yeast absorb the water.

Add water to approximately 24 liters. Stir the ingredients well.
Add the yeast.

You can close the lid with the airlock or just cover the fermenter with a cloth.
After a few hours you will see the first signs of fermentation and after some time it will create lots of CO2 which push the fruit particles up. Shake the fermenter daily to mix the fruit in the most. At this stage you do not want the must in a demijohn because the CO2 will push the fruit in the neck and it will create a big mess.

After some time the fermentation slows down and you can move the must to a demijohn. At this stage the new oxygen gives the yeast more energy. Which is a good thing.
The fermentation slows down even more. You can see that the fruit is almost destroyed and has lost much of its color. Time to take it out of the must.

I use a bag made of cloth to filter the bigger particles out of the must.
Place the must back in the demijohn and fill the bottle to the neck. The must is now completely full of yeast and is therefore a lot better protected against wild yeasts and bacteria.
Leave the bottle until it clears up. This usually goes very quick with strawberry jam. (Quick in winemaking terms.)
When the fermentation is completely stopped you can rack the wine of the lees into another demijohn. Add a little sulphite to protect the wine from oxidation and bacteria. At this stage oxygen is no longer our friend. There is no reason to be paranoid but keep the demijohn filled up to the neck to avoid oxidation.
I do not rack many times. When there is only a little layer sediment in the demijohn I leave it. There is not much influence in the end product and every time you rack you lose a little wine and get it in contact with oxygen.
Just before bottling I rack one last time; Dissolve a little sulphite in some water and add it to a sterile demijohn. Rack the wine in this demijohn and then bottle it.
Age it for one year; but of course you can test sometimes to see how it develops.
Cheers!

Apart from just enjoying drinking a few glasses of wine there is even more good news. Or should I say old news? http://www.drnorrie.info/html/article_winechronology.html As a matter of fact I use this all the time as a very good excuse: Drinking wine is healthy! As some websites say; world’s oldest documented man-made medicine.

I googled it a few years ago and was pleasantly surprised with a lot of good news. Many, many studies have “indicated” that drinking wine (Or any alcohol.) can improve your health in several different ways. There were not many who would claim that drinking IS better for your health but many would “suggest” that you would live longer if you drink 2 or 3 glasses per day. (Not 21 on Saturday evening!) I can understand that it is controversial to encourage people to drink and everybody should do what they believe is right.

“The ‘French paradox’ is the observation that although the French don’t eat a healthy diet, they show much reduced rates of coronary heart disease when compared with northern European nations such as the UK and Germany. The most popular explanation has been that the relatively high consumption of alcohol, and in particular wine, by the French acts to protect them from heart disease. Of course it is not possible to prove this.”

Again, this is all not really new news. In 1819 Samuel Black noted that there was a difference between heart disease rates between France and Ireland.

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/11/04/ije.dyr138.full

Probably because of other downsides caused by too much drinking, which obviously can be serious, the studies are not very well ventilated to the general public. Which is understandable because practically all studies point to other possible causes for the better health of the wine drinker. Better educated, wealthier, healthier diet etc.

If you want to read more about it, here are 2 other links. Jack Keller has probably the largest website about making wine at home. I am not really a big fan but there is a lot of knowledge there.

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/health.asp

“PubMed comprises more than 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.”

Here you can search for example on wine health benefits.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

Please note that I know nothing more than what I have read and that there are also studies that indicate the exact opposite of what is stated above. I have decided that I believe in the benefits and have a few drinks every day. Which apparently is even also the smart thing to do.

Hans

When I started making wine I decided to make a few kit wines for red wine (Never tried white wine kits.) to get a feeling for it. I had to teach it to myself. It seemed the easiest way and the wine would be finished very quickly.

I tried to make the wine according to the manual but I missed 2 important points. The first and biggest mistake was that I did not fill the demijohns completely when fermentation was finished. My demijohns are 25 liter and there was 20 liter of wine inside. I had no idea how to fill them completely. So when I drank the wine it was obvious that something was wrong. It was no disaster but it was definitely not good.

The second mistake was again my mistake. It clearly is mentioned that you have to degas the wine at some point. I also had no idea what that meant. For people who have never made kit wines; Kit wines have very much CO2 in them. To get rid of this you have to stir the wine pretty violently. The process will get air in the wine and it feels really unnatural. I was never able to find out why the kits retain the CO2. I forgot to do this and you can taste this flaw in the wine. It is not a fatal flaw but when you know that it’s there you can definitely taste it. You can also see it because there is more “foam” in the glass when you pour.

Result of a little shaking: Way too much CO2!

These wines were not good. Still drinkable but that’s all. I mixed them with store bought wine.

I have tried kit wines since I started and most of the time I made them according to the instructions. I also have tried aging them. Some people claim that this can be a mayor improvement. I don’t have this experience. The wines start with little taste and remain that way. I have tried medium priced kits and once a high priced kit. So far all of them were a bit disappointing. The wines are of a low quality. No taste. Not worth the money and effort.

I decided that I would try to improve the kits. They are almost the only ingredients I can get to make red wine. And some with reasonable success. I tried to use a different yeast. I thought that the yeast might be the cause of the remaining CO2 in the wine. I used a little bit extra oak chips. I even tried a little bit vanilla. (Very overpowering) I added blackberry juice with some extra sugar to fill up the demijohn. I added a little bit of dried or fresh elderberries. I also added extra sugar because my SG measurement indicated that the kit would only produce 11% alcohol which is not enough for a red wine.

All these made the wines a lot better. Some would still have too much CO2 but because the wines have more taste it is not so noticeable. Because of all the new ingredients it became necessary to age the wines at least 6 months and probably more to get a good balance. But that is also what wine is about. You have to be patient.

On the internet I read some tips about kit wines. Apparently some people are very happy with the outcome as is. I have not tried all brands but the ones that I have tried are not good enough without modifications. You need to add some stronger tastes and wait until they have merged.

Hans