Apricot Wine Recipe: Homemade Wine From Fresh or Dried Apricots

The short answer: a 1 gallon batch of apricot wine takes 2½ pounds of fresh apricots, 7 pints of water, 2 pounds of sugar, 1¼ teaspoons of acid blend, a teaspoon of pectic enzyme, ¼ teaspoon of grape tannin, a crushed Campden tablet, and wine yeast with nutrient. You dice the fruit into a straining bag, squeeze it into the bucket, add the yeast after 24 hours, and lift the bag out after five days. It needs about a year in the bottle.

That is the first of the apricot recipes Jack Keller collected on his Winemaking Home Page, adapted from Raymond Massaccesi’s Winemaker’s Recipe Handbook. Keller listed several more, and one of them is the answer when apricot season is over: a wine made from dried apricots and golden raisins, which you can start in any month. Both are below, written for one US gallon. If you have never made a fruit wine, our guide to making wine from fruit covers the basics, and the full collection of homemade wine recipes has the rest of the orchard.

Apricot Wine at a Glance

Yield is about five 750 ml bottles per gallon, once the lees are left behind.

Choosing Apricots for Wine

Fresh: ripe, soft and unblemished

Use fruit that is fully ripe, the point where an apricot gives under your thumb and smells of itself. Underripe apricots bring sharp acid and little flavor; overripe ones that are already leaking or moldy bring spoilage. Cut out bruises. Keller’s method starts with washing, pitting and dicing, so there is no need to peel. Throw the pits away; they play no part in any of his recipes.

How much fruit per gallon

Keller’s fresh recipes use 2 to 2½ pounds of apricots to the gallon, which is less fruit than many country wines. His fig wine uses 4 pounds and his kiwi wine 3 to 4. Apricots are strongly flavored, and a light hand with the fruit keeps the wine from turning heavy and jammy. If you want a bigger, fruitier wine, our grape and fruit calculator shows how much fruit a batch size needs at a stronger ratio.

Dried apricots

Dried apricots make a different wine, darker and rounder. Buy them unsulfured or lightly treated if you can, and read the bag: some dried fruit is coated in oil to stop it sticking, and oil floats on wine and spoils the finish. Chop them small so the water can reach the flesh.

Apricot Wine Step by Step

Day one: sulfite first, yeast tomorrow

The Campden tablet goes in with the sugar water and the fruit sits in it for a day before any yeast arrives. That pause lets the sulfite knock back the wild yeast and bacteria on the skins. Pectic enzyme goes in at the same time and starts breaking down the pectin in the fruit, which is what keeps an apricot wine from setting a permanent haze. Our guide to Campden tablets explains why the wait is 24 hours.

Days two to six: squeeze and stir

Keller’s card asks for two jobs a day. Squeeze the bag once to push more juice out of the flesh, and stir the must twice to keep the cap of fruit wet and the yeast working. Use a sanitized spoon or gloved hands. Apricot flesh is soft and gives up its juice quickly, which is why five days on the pulp is enough here, half the time a dried fruit wine needs.

Day six: pull the bag

Lift the bag, let it drain, and strain the juice into the secondary. Squeezing at this stage pushes fine pulp through the mesh, so press it lightly. Fit the airlock and leave the jug somewhere steady.

The long middle: two rackings

Rack off the sediment after 30 days and again 60 days later. Each racking leaves behind dead yeast and fruit solids. Our racking guide covers how to siphon without stirring the lees back up. Top up with a little water or a similar wine after each racking so the jug stays full to the neck.

Bottling and the year of waiting

Bottle when the wine is clear and has stopped dropping sediment. Keller’s instruction is one year or longer in the bottle. If you want to check, open one bottle at six months and leave the rest. Our guide on how to bottle and cork wine covers the bottling day.

The Dried Apricot Version

Why golden raisins

Dried apricots give flavor but little of the structure that makes a wine feel like wine. The pound of golden raisins in Keller’s card adds body and a grape backbone, and the light brown sugar adds a faint caramel note that suits dried fruit. Chop both so they release their sugar into the water over the ten days.

A third option between the two

Keller’s second apricot card sits between the fresh and dried wines. It uses 2 pounds of fresh apricots, ½ pound of chopped golden raisins, 3 pounds of sugar and the juice of 2 lemons in place of acid blend, with Champagne yeast, seven days on the pulp and the same racking schedule. With a pound more sugar than the first recipe, it will finish stronger, or sweeter if the yeast gives up first. Keller marks it as a passed-on recipe of unknown source, and says to taste it at six months but allow a year for maturity.

Gravity, Strength and Sweetness

Take a reading anyway

Keller’s apricot cards give amounts, not gravities, so the only way to know how strong your wine will be is to measure it. Take a hydrometer reading of the must before the yeast goes in and another when fermentation ends, then run both through the wine ABV calculator. Our hydrometer guide covers how to read one. If the starting reading is lower than you want, the sugar calculator tells you how much sugar raises it to your target.

Making it sweeter

Fermented out, apricot wine finishes dry. If you prefer it softer, stabilize it after the last racking and sweeten to taste before bottling. The steps and the stabilizers are in our guide to backsweetening wine. Never add sugar to a wine that has not been stabilized, or it can restart in the bottle.

If it will not clear

A fruit wine that is still hazy after several months often has a pectin haze, the cloudiness pectic enzyme is there to prevent, and it may need more enzyme or a fining agent. Our guide on how to clear wine covers what to try. Apricots share most of their habits with peaches, so our peach wine recipe is a good companion if you have both trees.

Make and drink wine responsibly, and only if you are of legal drinking age.