On some forums, you can find some recipes for Chocolate wine, so I thought I would give it a go.
I was quite shocked at how chocolate wine tasted, but it did have a bitter after taste for me, must have been all the dark cocoa powder. To tell the truth, I love chocolate, but not dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is my thing, and even more irresistible is a Terry's Chocolate Orange, so could I create a recipe to match.
After lots of reading, I found nothing about a milk chocolate wine, so I had to make it up, with a few tweaks here and there and I think I have it!
You'll find the full Milk Chocolate Wine recipe on our wine recipes page, but here is a quick rundown.
It's quite an involved recipe, but the results are well worth it. I added an orange to the mix to give it that citrus hit, but if you just want a Galaxy (or Cadbury's) chocolate wine, then just drop the orange.
So, you'll need a 175g of dark cocoa powder. Did you know that the cocoa powder we get here has been "Dutched"? This means the cocoa beans have been soaked in sodium bicarbonate (baking powder). This removes a large proportion of the cocoa beans bitterness and makes the resulting cocoa powder even more delicious. It also makes it darker, which means even better looking chocolate cake. But we aren't making cake here, we are making wine.
Ok, so how are we going to turn it to milk chocolate. Well here comes my friend, Lactose. A non fermentable (the yeast cant eat it) sugar that comes from milk. Not only does it sweeten the finished wine, but it also adds a lush creamy mouth feel to the chocolate wine, turning it to milk chocolate, mmmmmm!
If you love the smell of cakes baking, or coffee brewing, you are going to love the aromas in the kitchen when you are making this chocolate wine!
So how did I make it? It's easy!
First, you need to make some Raisin Juice the night before, this will add extra body and depth to the wine, or it can feel thin in the mouth.
The next day we get to work and make a smooth paste with the cocoa powder, then add some boiling water and bring it to the boil. This helps get lots more flavour out of the cocoa powder.
Into the fermenter with the cocoa liquid, and the raisin juice, just over a kilo of sugar, and then more water to bring it up to just over the gallon mark. We'll loose quite a bit to sediment, so we need to add some extra water so that we get the 6 bottles from this recipe.
Then in goes some pectolase not only to break down any pectin, but to help extract more colour and flavour. Then some yeast nutrient and some Tartaric Acid to help give the wine a little extra kick. Oh if you didn't use the orange, its also time to add 1/2 tsp of citric acid to help the tartaric acid give you that wine zing.
The yeast I have been using is VR21 as this helps bring out the fruity flavours in the cocoa. Yes, after the yeast have bio-transformed (eaten and then excreted new flavours) the cocoa esters you get this amazing fruity flavours.
Now, with all that cocoa powder, the CO2 created by the yeast makes it really foamy and it forms a thick crust on top of the wine. This means all that lovely cocoa is not in contact with the wine, so we need to knock it back down in. A gentle stir does it. Then back on with the lid till tomorrow when it will need knocking back again.
At day 5 stop knocking it back or it will be hard to syphon it into the demijohn
Then after 7 days it's time to move it to a demijohn for a couple of weeks, as although it will seem like all the fermentation is over, you would be wrong. Just because there is no more sugar for the yeast to eat, they will now eat other compounds in the wine and turn them from boring uninteresting compounds, into something that delights your taste buds. So don't rush this part. Just let it sit in the demijohn to do it's thing.
It will have began to settle, so rack it off into a new clean demijohn and add the fermentation stopper to kill off any remaining yeast.
Now we turn it to milk chocolate.
We need to put about 250 ml of the wine into a small saucepan and pour in the lactose and mix it in. It will look cloudy and white - a bit like milk.
Put the pan on the stove and gently bring up the heat, giving it regular stirs to stop it catching on the bottom. Then as it comes to the boil the magic happens and suddenly it will turn from being milky, to clear. It's at this stage it comes off the heat.
swirl the wine in the demijohn and while its still whirling around, pour the hot lactose wine into the demijohn and then swirl it around again to mix it all in.
Add the vanilla and swirl again. We'll need to swirl the wine a few times a day for the next 2 days to knock out any trapped CO2 and to help the fermentation stopper do its job.
And then the finings to help this wine clear.
Then once clear, it's into bottles.
Now if you can leave it at least a month before popping open a bottle well done, you have more will power than me.
I always hide a bottle away so I can forget about it. 3-6 months tends to be best, fresh, but not too fresh. 2 years seems awesome, but is that really going to happen.
So there you have it, Milk Chocolate Orange Wine. Remember it's not Terry's, It's MINE!
Have a go at my Milk Chocolate Wine Recipe and see how yours turns out and let me know of any tweaks you would make.
Cheers & Happy Brewing.
Davin
