Sloe gin is an infusion: you steep sloes and sugar in a bottle of shop-bought gin, wait a few months and strain, and the alcohol was already there before you started. Sloe wine is a fermentation: yeast eats the sugar you add to the fruit and makes the alcohol itself, which takes eight to twelve weeks and gives you six bottles rather than one. Both start from the same small, blue-black, mouth-puckering fruit of the blackthorn, and if you have picked a decent haul in November there is a good case for doing both. Here is how they differ, and which suits the sloes you have.
What is a sloe, and when do you pick them?
Sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn, a thorny hedgerow shrub that flowers white and early in spring, long before its leaves appear. The fruit is small, round, blue-black with a dusty bloom, and looks like a miniature plum, which is roughly what it is. Eaten raw it is astringent enough to dry your mouth out entirely, which is why nobody eats them raw and everybody does something clever with them instead.
They ripen from October and are traditionally picked after the first frost, which softens the skins and makes the juice easier to get at. If autumn is mild, a night in the freezer does the same job, and plenty of people freeze them anyway so they can pick when they find them and make when they have time. Mind the thorns, which are long and unforgiving, and leave plenty on the bush for the birds.
How sloe gin works
You prick or freeze the sloes to break the skins, half fill a jar with them, add sugar, top up with gin, seal and shake. Then you leave it somewhere dark, turning the jar now and then, for several weeks to several months, before straining out the fruit and bottling the liquid.
Nothing ferments. The sugar sweetens and the alcohol pulls colour and flavour out of the fruit, which is exactly how any steeped spirit works, gin kits included. The finished drink is a liqueur: sweet, deep red, lower in strength than the gin you started with because the sugar has diluted it, and drunk in small glasses.
The practical points are that it is quick to set up, it needs one bottle of spirit and one big jar, and it gives you roughly the volume of spirit you put in. It is also the more forgiving of the two, since there is no yeast to keep happy.
How sloe wine works
Sloe wine is a country wine like any other. The sloes go into a first fermentation with sugar, water and the winemaking ingredients, and the crushed fruit sits in the liquid for about three days while the yeast gets to work. Then you strain the fruit off, move the liquid into a demijohn or second bucket under an airlock for a longer second fermentation, and finally bottle it and let it mature.
Our Hedgerow Wine Making Kit supplies what the fruit cannot: wine yeast, yeast nutrient, pectolase, finings (a very fine bentonite clay, with nothing animal derived in it), citric acid, a stabiliser tablet, a steriliser (sodium metabisulphite) and the recipe table. You add the sloes, the sugar and the water, plus a five litre food grade bucket with a lid, a five litre demijohn or second bucket with an airlock, a siphon and bottles.
One batch is a gallon, about four and a half litres, which is six standard bottles, ready in eight to twelve weeks. Young sloe wine is dark and firmly tannic. Left longer it rounds out into something much softer, and it is one of the country wines most obviously improved by patience.
Which should you make?
- How many sloes have you got? A modest pocketful is a jar of sloe gin. A full carrier bag is a gallon of wine with some to spare.
- How long will you wait? Sloe gin can be strained after a couple of months. Sloe wine needs eight to twelve weeks and then wants longer still.
- What do you want at the end? A sweet liqueur for a small glass after dinner, or six bottles of dry, dark table wine.
- What are you willing to buy? Sloe gin needs a bottle of gin. Sloe wine needs sugar, a bucket, a demijohn and an airlock, which you then own for every batch afterwards.
- Do you like a project? Steeping is simple. Fermenting is a craft, with stages, temperatures and a certain amount of watching an airlock.
Can you do both from one picking?
Easily, and it is the sensible answer if the blackthorn has been generous. Freeze the whole haul, then divide it: a jar's worth for the gin, the rest for the wine. Frozen fruit makes good wine, as long as you defrost it thoroughly and let it come up to room temperature before it meets the yeast, or the liquid will be too cold for fermentation to start.
There is a third option that costs nothing extra. The sloes strained out of a finished sloe gin still hold plenty of flavour, and people traditionally use them in chocolates or a fruit cheese rather than throwing them away.
Whichever you choose, keep the wine somewhere steady between 22 and 27 degrees Celsius, drink the finished bottles within a year of bottling, and remember that both of these are alcoholic drinks for adults aged 18 and over. The kit's allergen line is contains sulphur dioxide and sulphites. Every ingredient is listed on the pack, and if you have an allergy question, email hello@sandyleaffarm.com before ordering.
Sloe wine and sloe gin FAQs
Is sloe wine the same as sloe gin?
No. Sloe gin is sloes and sugar steeped in gin that was already made, so nothing ferments. Sloe wine is fermented, so the yeast makes the alcohol from the sugar you add.
How many bottles does a batch of sloe wine make?
One gallon, about four and a half litres, or six standard bottles, ready in eight to twelve weeks. Sloe wine is one of the country wines that most rewards being left longer than that.
Do I need to prick sloes for wine as well as for gin?
For wine the fruit is crushed as part of the first fermentation, so pricking is unnecessary. Freezing them first still helps, because it breaks the skins and releases more juice.
What does sloe wine taste like?
Dark, dry and quite tannic when young, closer to a firm red than to a liqueur. Time softens it considerably, so it is worth holding a few bottles back.
What do I need to buy to make sloe wine?
The sloes, sugar and water, plus a bucket, a demijohn or second bucket with an airlock, a siphon and bottles. Everything else is in our hedgerow wine kit.
Got a bag of sloes and no plan? Have a look at our wine making kits.
