50+ Winemaking Recipes for Homemade Wine (from Any Fruit!) (2024)

Winemaking recipes were once an important part of preserving the harvest, but they can be hard to find these days. Country fruit wines have been made in backyards and homesteads for hundreds of years, no winery required. Don’t worry, it’s easier than you think!

These days, if you say “wine” most people assume you mean grape wine, but really, you can make wine out of just about any fruit (or flower, or vegetable).

Grape wine, believe it or not, is the most complicated to make, but other wines are surprisingly easy for beginners.

I’ve put together this list of just about every fruit, flower, and vegetable winemaking recipe I can find to help get you started.

Making Wine at Home

If you’re new to winemaking, I’d suggest you also read the other posts in this series, including:

Beginners Guide to Making Fruit Wines, where I take you through all the steps in the winemaking process.
Small Batch Winemaking can be done for micro-batches, making as little as 1 bottle of wine at a time, and the process and equipment are a bit different with super tiny batches.
How to Make Mead (Honey Wine) is mostly the same, but there are some particularities when working with honey.
Equipment for Winemaking, which covers all the durable equipment you’ll need to make your first batch (besides your ingredients).
Ingredients for Winemaking, which covers all the other things you’ll need (besides yeast).
Yeast for Winemaking can get complicated quickly, and there are dozens of common strains (and hundreds of obscure ones). Picking the right one is actually pretty important, but I’ve broken them all down for you.
How to Make Wine from Grapes, though not necessarily for beginners, but everyone always asks about this one first!
Meadmaking Recipes are even more obscure than winemaking recipes, but I’ve got you covered there too.

If you’d like to learn more, I’d recommend the following winemaking books:

Artisanal Small-Batch Brewing: Easy Homemade Wines, Beers, Meads, and Ciders by Amber Shehan
The Home Winemakers Companion by Ed Halloran
The Joy of Home Winemaking by Terry Garey

Elderberry Wine

Winemaking Recipes

I’ve broken this list of winemaking recipes down by type of fruit, with categories including:

Grape Wine Recipes
Pom Fruit Wines (Apples, Pears, Quince, etc.)
Stonefruit Wines (Peach, Plum, Cherry, etc.)
Berry Wines (Blackberry, Strawberry, etc.)
Citrus Wine Recipes (Orange, Lemon, etc.)
Tropical Fruit Wine Recipes (Pineapple, Papaya, etc.)
Other Fruit Wines (Misc fruits like elderberry, cranberry, persimmon, etc.)
Flower and Herb Wines
Vegetable and Root Wines

Scroll down until you find what you’re looking for; there’s plenty to choose from!

Grape Wine Recipes

Making grape wine is challenging, and not for beginners. If you’re just getting started, I’d recommend scrolling down further and making another type of fruit wine for your first batch.

If you’ve got your heart set on grape wine, then I strongly recommend making your first grape wine with a kit, using purchased wine grape juice. It’s standardized so you know it has the right sugar/acid/tannin, and the kid will come with the perfect yeast for that type of juice. You’ll be able to learn the process without having to worry about the actual chemistry of your particular grapes.

In terms of specific recipes, there is an incredible free downloadable pdf (300+ pages) with all the custom recipes that Jack Keller wrote for his readers in his lifetime. He was a winemaking icon for many years, and he sadly passed away just a few years back. All his readers put together a big printable of all his recipes, as he shared them so freely in his lifetime. It’s an incredible resource for any beginning winemaker (and free)!

There are quite a few grape wine recipes included in there, including:

Pom Fruit Wines (Apple, Pear, Quince, etc.)

Fruits in the apple family are usually known for making hard cider and perry, but they also make delightful wines.

While hard cider is more like beer (with a low alcohol level, and usually very dry), apple wine can be anything you choose. If made right, it can be anywhere from dry to very sweet, like a dessert wine.

The same goes for other pom fruits, like pears, hawthorn, quince, and rosehips.

Apple Wine
Hawthorn Wine
Pear Wine
Rosehip Wine
Quince Wine

Apple wine

Stonefruit Wine Recipes (Cherry, Peach, Plum, etc.)

Winemaking works well with stone fruits, especially clingstone varieties that are difficult to pit without mashing them to pieces. Since you can make wine with chunks of fruit (pits included), it’s a great way to use up a bumper crop in a hurry.

When our summer plums come in each year, we make a big batch of plum wine with them. If we were in the south, we’d do the same with peaches too.

Cherry Wine
Peach Wine
Apricot Wine
Plum Wine
Greengage plum wine
Damson Plum Wine

Plum wine

Berry Wine Recipes

A true delight, berry wines capture the fresh flavors (and colors) of summer in a sweet sipping wine that’s perfect year-round.

I’m especially fond of raspberry wine made with fresh summer raspberries, but they’re all good!

Blackberry Wine
Blueberry Wine
Raspberry Wine
Strawberry Wine

Raspberry Wine

Citrus Wine Recipes

Citrus fruits have a refreshing flavor that works wonderfully in wine.

They take a bit of extra care to ferment, since they’re so acidic, but it can help to use a winemaking yeast with a high tolerance for acidic ferments.

Good wine yeast choices include MA33 Country Wine Yeast because it can reduce the acidity of wine and tolerates highly acidic environments, and Lalvin K1-V1116, because it works well in all manner of extreme conditions.

Tropical Fruit Wine Recipes

Generally, when tropical fruits come in season, they’re available in bulk and inexpensive. For us in the northern hemisphere, that’s usually mid-winter when there’s little else in season (and little other winemaking going on).

They’re a great way to stay busy in the off-season, and downright delicious.

Banana Wine
Kiwi Wine
Pineapple Wine

Pineapple wine

Other Fruit Wine Recipes

These other fruits don’t fit neatly into a category, so I’ve lumped them all together.

If there’s a particular fruit wine recipe you’re hoping to find, please leave me a note in the comments, and I’ll try to find one and add it for you.

Cranberry Wine
Elderberry Wine
Persimmon Wine
Pomegranate Wine
Rhubarb Wine (I know, it’s a vegetable, but it’s used like a fruit)
Watermelon Wine

Homemade rhubarb wine

Herbal and Flower Wine Recipes

You don’t have to have fresh fruit to make homemade wine!

Believe it or not, you can make amazing wine from flowers and herbs. Usually, the sweet-scented petals are used from flowers, a the tender leaves of culinary herbs.

Dandelion Wine
Rose Wine
Lilac Wine
Coltsfoot Wine

Rose Petal Wine

Vegetable and Root Wines

While fruit wines are, of course, more common, you can actually make wine out of vegetables too.

Root crops are popular because they tend to be full of natural sugars, but wines were historically also made from waste products like corn cobs and pea pods.

You can even make savory cooking wines from things like garlic and onions. They’re not meant for drinking straight, but they contribute a lot of flavors to braised meat or risotto.

Parsnip wine

Fermentation Ideas

Brewing up more than just wine this year? Expand your horizons with these recipes:

How to Make Mead (Honey Wine)
50+ Mead Recipes
How to Make Homemade Beer
How to Make Hard Cider
How to Make Pear Cider (Perry)