Making apple wine: core the apples first?

October 24, 2004 1:12 PM

My guy and I are about to take our first shot at making apple wine. I can't tell from our recipe: should we core the apples? Aren't the seeds poisonous in quantity, or something? Any help is appreciated!
posted by clever sheep to Food & Drink (4 answers total)

Apple seeds in quantity have cyanide in them. However, short of that, they also don't taste too good. Most of the recipes I've looked at involve coring the apples.
posted by jessamyn at 1:28 PM on October 24, 2004

My mom's from Normandy, where they still have traveling presses that go from town to town in the fall and crush any apples you bring in to make your own cider. (A lot of my relatives still drink hard cider and Calvados rather than beer and Cognac.)

The basic impression I've always gotten is that if you're crushing or pressing the apples, you don't have to bother, since a dedicated apple press will crush the fruit to a point that most of the juice comes out, but the seeds are basically left whole, and they're basically strained out when you clarify the juice.

jessamyn's basic point still holds, though--the seeds are bitter, and if you're using a technique that would blend them into the raw juice, you should core the apples first.

(It's like wine--they crush the grapes with skins, seeds, stems and leaves, but they crush them gently enough that those components stay whole, and get strained out later.)
posted by LairBob at 4:06 PM on October 24, 2004

I have made an absolutely fantastic apple mead from this recipe. It needed several years of aging before it was good. And it doesn't actually use any apples.
posted by goethean at 8:44 AM on October 25, 2004

Dang it...here's the link.
posted by goethean at 8:48 AM on October 25, 2004