I’ve been wanting to try making Mango Wine for a little while now. I helped my brother make some while I was visiting him a couple years ago, but he didn’t give it the best reviews on the results. I had some ripe mangoes that I had put in my freezer last year, and then I recently came into a box full of very ripe mangoes that needed to be used somehow. Well, that made it pretty easy to decide to finally make this wine. I’m aiming for a sweeter desert wine, and may play with some back sweetening if there isn’t enough residual sugar left over.
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Process:
I pulled out the mangoes that I had in my freezer and let them thaw overnight. The next day I pitted all the mangoes and cut/scooped their innards out into a bucket for primary fermentation. After getting all of the easy fruit into the bucket, I then went back and cut the remaining bits off of the pits. The mangoes were all very ripe, and the ones that had been frozen were fairly mushy in consistency, making them perfect for wine.
I collected just under a gallon of mango into my bucket. I forgot to weight the mangoes to see how many pounds I had, so I just wrote the volume of pulp into the recipe. I did count the pits I had left over, and I ended up using 17 mangoes in total, all medium to large in size.
I then used a hand blender to turn the fruit into thick pulp, breaking down all of the larger pieces of fruit. I then added the sugar and enough water to reach a total volume just above 3 gallons. I measured the OG at 1.100, but I’m sure this was thrown off a bit by the thickness of the pulp. I added the pectic enzyme, pitched the yeast, and sealed the bucket with an airlock.
5-26-14: Put into primary bucket. OG measured at 1.100.
6-27-14: Filtered and racked into 3 1-gallon carboys. FG measured at 0.990 giving a strength of 14.7% ABV.
12-20-14: This wine wasn’t a success. I was going to bottle today, but tasting the wine convinced me otherwise. The flavor was very alcoholic, with no trace of mango flavor. It just wasn’t a good wine, and therefore it is the first wine that I have ended up dumping. I only had 3 gallons, so it’s not a big loss, but I really wasn’t looking forward to drinking it, and it wasn’t something I would give to other people.