Like you I am a lover of wine. I developed my interest in wine in university when my friends would host wine and cheese parties, which were not only fun because of the new people I met but also because of all of the different types of wine I was exposed to. 
The Cherry Wine Project: Getting Your Cherries Ready
Thursday, July 31st, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
To get things rolling here let’s use this post to talk about what we did to get the cleaned and ready for the fruit press!
If you’ve read “The Birth Of The Cherry Wine Project” then you already know that we purchased 20 lbs of beautiful and juicy red cherries in British Columbia - at Carl’s Fruit Stand to be exact (located on the highway between Kamloops and Valemont).
As you can imagine getting 20 lbs of cherries ready for wine making was going to take a bit of “elbow grease” because you have to remove the pit (aka the “stone”) from inside the cherry before you make your wine because:
- They prevent you from being able to press all of the juice out of the cherries
- If broken/cut they add a bitter taste to your wine
My wife Michelle and I therefore decided to invest $28 CAD in a “Cherry Stoner” from Carl’s Fruit Stand (last one they had - so I’m told - probably a trick to get us to buy it) so that we can quickly and easily remove the pit from the cherry.
I have to say, this was a great investment as we were able to get through the batch of cherries pretty quickly!
I should point out though that before we “stoned the cherries” Michelle cleaned them first.
She disinfected our kitchen sink, filled it with the cherries, ozonated water (we happen to have a little ozone generator I installed under our sink that we purchased from Cashidoo) and added Nature Clean All Natural Fruit and Veggie Wash (helps remove pesticides, bacteria and dirt).
You can never be sure what the fruit farmers used to grow their fruit or what is living on them despite how tasty they look!
She then made fast work of the cherries using our new Cherry Stoner. If you’ve never seen one here’s how it works:
- Load your cherries into the little “cherry bin”
- Press down on the plunger
- “Stoned” cherry pops out
- Repeat until you are left with these:
To be perfectly honest, it was a lot easier then I thought. It certainly helped that my wife Michelle chipped in and actually surprised me by doing most of the work on her day off while I was at work.
Fruit Cleaning Tips:
- Garbage In/Garbage Out: Be sure to sort through your fruit and discard stems, bugs, dirt and spoiled fruit. If you wouldn’t put it in your mouth it probably shouldn’t be in your wine. Your wine will only be as good as what you put into it.
- Tools of the trade: No matter what fruit you choose to make your wine with consider what tools you can use to make the job a whole lot easier to remove pits, seeds and anything else that shouldn’t be there.
- Many hands make light work: Part of the lure of wine making is the social aspect so it doesn’t hurt to get someone to help you out. It also makes some of the more daunting and less fun tasks get done much more quickly plus you have someone to chat with!
Up Next:
Stay tuned as next week we look at how we pressed the cherries to “coax” the juice out of them … 
Enjoy and if you haven’t already please join in the discussion by becoming a member of our Cherry Wine Project community by going to http://thecherrywineproject.ning.com/
- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”
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Good question but the answer is simple … my wife and I were in British Columbia (where some of the best fruit in Canada come from) a few weekends ago, drove by a fruit stand and saw that they were selling 20 lb boxes of fresh, juicy cherries. So how could we resist!