How to Make Simple Homemade Peach Wine

I want to tell you how to make peach wine, but first I have to tell you a short story. Bear with me.

We have a little orchard with over 30 young apple trees that don’t bear fruit yet, one old cherry tree, one old pear tree, and one old peach tree. This peach tree is one of the saddest excuses for a fruit tree I’ve ever seen. In fact, I spent my first winter here swearing it was a plum tree – David believed it was a peach, and he turned out to be right.

I was roaming around our little orchard about a month ago after doing some mowing with the brush cutter, and saw, to my surprise, peaches on the peach tree! This was the first time in three summers I have seen this thing bear fruit.

By my reckoning, there were two dozen peaches on that tree.

Holy. Cow.

I picked one, even though I knew the fruits weren’t ripe yet. I bit in, and despite the hardness of the flesh, it was the most delicious peach I’d ever tasted. It tasted like “peach flavoring” wants to taste.

I skipped off to find David and tell him about the peaches and to let him have a bite (I finished the peach before I found him though, oops). I raved about these peaches for about 20 minutes, with visions of peach wine, peach cobbler, peach preserves, and pancakes with peaches dancing in my head. David recommended that we wait a week or so for them to ripen. I agreed.

Well, about a week later, I returned to the tree in the middle of a thunderstorm, afraid the rain and wind would knock all of the countless, 24 peaches off the tree… only to find that the peaches were gone. All of them! I couldn’t even find one measly peach on the ground!

Deer, squirrels, raccoons, maybe even my goat; somebody got there before I did.

The lesson? I should have picked them when I had the chance, and made wine.

Or built a fortress around the orchard – either way.