A delightful, bright, and flavorful sparkling wine/champagne made from sweet pumpkins.
All implements and containers should be sterilized at each step, preferably using StarSan. All materials and ingredients we use are linked in the section below this recipe card. We used a 3.5 gallon Ss Brewtech stainless steel fermenter for this recipe. Regardless of what you use, we recommend not using plastic (including food grade plastic) due to potential leaching from the plastic in an acidic, microbially active environment.
Grate 10 pounds fresh pumpkin (we used a food processor w/ a grater attachment, but a cheese grater works too) and put grated pumpkin in your primary fermenter.
Warm 14 cups water on the stove and add 5 pounds organic cane sugar, stirring until it is just dissolved, then let it cool.
Add pectinase, yeast NUTRIENT, acid blend, and tannin to sugar water mix. Do NOT add the yeast at this point.
Add water to fermenter until it reaches the 3 gallon mark. (You'll lose some liquid each time you rack and you'll want to get at least 7 bottles of champagne out of this recipe.)
The specific gravity should be about 1.100 which will give a final ABV of about 14.5%. Crush 1 Campden tablet and add to mixture. Let sit for 24 hours with a thin towel on top so the mixture can breathe. This is important so the sulfur dioxide from the Campden tablets can gas off.
After 24 hours, remove 1 cup liquid and pour into a sterilized jar. Add 1 packet of wine yeast, stir, cover with thin towel, and let sit for 1-2 hours until the yeast is proofed (very active).
Add yeast/liquid mixture to main pumpkin mixture, stir and cover with thin towel for 2 days, stirring at least twice each day (morning and evening). Be sure to sterilize your spoon! In this instance, you’re leaving the mixture free to mix with air since the rapidly dividing yeast needs more oxygen than it can access through an airlock.
On the third day, put a solid, non-breathable lid on the primary fermenter with an airlock. Continue to stir twice a day for 5 to 6 more days. The air lock should no longer be bubbling vigorously by the end.
Racking. Specific gravity reading upon racking our mixtures was 1.020. Strain the pumpkin from the mixture and siphon from the primary fermenter to a glass carboy/jug with an air lock. (*Note: You can also rack off by siphoning to a temporary container, dispose of the lees, then put the mixture back in your primary fermenter. We put ours into a glass carboy because we wanted to start a new elderberry wine in our wide-topped Ss stainless steel fermenter.) Put the carboy in a cool, dark place for a month.
After one month, rack off the lees into a sterilized stock pot, clean out the carboy to remove lees, and siphon from the stock pot back into the carboy. Rack up to two more times to remove any remaining sediment/lees before bottling. This may take a couple months as the small particles slowly descend and settle on the bottom of the carboy.
Bottling is the tricky and potentially dangerous part, so please read carefully: Your yeast should have broken down nearly all the sugar in your ferment, so to get a final bubbly end product you'll need to either: Option 1) bottle as-is and use a DrinkMate before drinking to add bubbles (safest option, but smaller bubbles); Option 2) Andrea's method of adding more sugar & yeast when bottling (riskier than Option 1 but great results).
Instructions for Option 1: Ferment to zero residual sugar, bottle in sterilized bottles, and let mature for at least 3 months. Then chill the bottle until it’s very cold, pour into two DrinkMate bottles and carbonate to add the bubbles. The bubbles are pretty fine – not the large bubbles you get with water and traditional sparkling wines/champagnes.
Instructions for Option 2: Done while NOT using champagne bottles + champagne corks/tie downs (which are specifically designed to withstand enormous pressure), this method can result in "bottle bombs." Yes, that means exploding bottles of liquid and flying glass. USE CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES ONLY or do NOT use this method.
Put 10 grams of sugar in each empty bottle. Then take 1 cup of the wine, add a couple tablespoons of sugar and a packet of Lalvin K1-V1116 yeast. Stir it and wait until sugar is dissolved and yeast is activated. Then, pour it back into the carboy, stir again to mix well. Then bottle into sanitized bottles.
From Andrea: "The nice thing about pumpkin champagne making is this: if the second, in -bottle fermentation fails, the added sugar goes nicely with the fruity notes of the wine. It isn’t overly sweet, but provides the needed “oomph” for a fruit wine. If, on the other hand, the second fermentation works, the bubbles balance the acidity of the wine. It’s a win-win!"
After 3 months, you can start enjoying your own homemade pumpkin champagne.
Direct from Andrea: "I also store the bottles upright in a big plastic bin. The reason is that, with in-bottle fermentation, one gets sediment: fluffy yeast clouds. By storing it upright, from fermentation to chilling in the fridge, I keep that sludge in the bottom. I then pour glasses until there’s about an inch left in the bottle (which can be sucked down by a yeast-loving or somewhat alcoholic friend."
Remember to chill your pumpkin champagne before serving!
Pumpkin champagne https://www.tyrantfarms.com/tony-williamson-and-andrea-deyrup-pumpkin-champagne-recipe/