Red tomato wine would be a big project. As with the white, it would start with seeds in early spring. After tending the plants and harvesting in the summer, I’d start making the wine. It would need to age for a year or two. If I do all that, it will be with open eyes, thanks to you. If not, you may have saved me a lot of trouble.

So thank you!

Your plan outline makes it clear you know much more than I do about what you’re looking for — you don’t say anything about the tannins in grape skins, for instance, which I would have thought were relevant.

In case they are, tomatoes don’t have ‘em. Maybe it would make sense for you to taste the tomato skins before bothering to make the wine. If you want to do that without the changes heat would create , you can get the tomato skins this way:

freeze whole tomato until completely solid. Hold frozen tomato under running water (temp doesn’t matter) for a few seconds. Skin will slip right off.

google is rich with academic deconstructions of tomatoes btw; a lot of research has been done , especially on the flavonoids.

Good point on your blog about the denigration implied in “fruit wine,” given that grapes are themselves fruits. On the other hand, I think grapes are universally understood to be the basis of “wine.” Saying “fruit wine” saves us all from having to say “otherfruit wine” when we want to be sure everybody knows we’re not talking about the grape kind (or sake).

When you say that tomato skins don’t affect the flavor, that could scuttle the whole project. The flavonoids in grape skins provide red wine with it’s characteristic flavor, and I would need them, even if they were different types and in different concentrations, to make a red wine from tomatoes. Some of my books go into the composition of grapes, but I haven’t been able to find similar information about tomatoes. Do you know of a good book or web site?

I’m not using a recipe. Instead, I intend to make the tomato wine the same way you would make a grape wine. For the white, that would mean extracting the juice, adjusting the sugar and acid, then fermenting. No added water and no flavoring agents. I’ve outlined my plan in more detail here. My plans for red wine are more fuzzy, but I hope to make it as much like a red grape wine as possible. That Tomat-O-Red might come in handy if color extraction isn’t very good.

Interesting to hear about the tomato wine; confess I was mentioning it mostly to make the point; not being big fans of fruit wines with food (about the only time we drink wine except at other people’s parties) we’ve never thought about making any.

I HAVE made “tomato figs,” a 19th century preserve that’s essentially candied tomatoes. They were pretty good, but there’s just so much candied fruit you can eat, even counting the Christmas baking.

Returning to the wine question, Black Russian is the only tomato on your list that we have grown. It was ok, but not as good as Black Prince or Black from Tula, and they in turn were less delicious than the Japanese Black Trifele that is our current standby. It’s much darker than it looks in the picture, and very prolific. It is also on the small side, though not as small as your recipe seems to be requiring. ( Black Russian is no beefsteak; but it’s a full size tomato.)

As far as Seattle goes, the only problem I can imagine is insufficient heat and sun for whatever tomato you grew to do its best for you.

After reading your comment, I looked briefly at some tomato wine recipes and notice those for red tomato wine include different flavoring agents than those suggested for white. I would guess that those agents are the only thing that makes red tomato wine taste different from white.

Unlike grapes, tomatoes do not have skins that that affect flavor. The red in the red ones comes from carotinoids, primarily lycopene, that are present in very small amounts and seem to have little influence on taste , which in tomatoes comes primarily from sugars and acids.

In purified form, red tomato carotinoids are sold as flavorless natural coloring agents. A lot better than Red #2 - http://www.lycored.com/web/content/colorant-tomat-o-red.asp - if you’re curious.

Please let us know how the white comes out - especially compared to other unusual wines, if you make them too.

I’m trying to find out more about them, and I wonder if you can help. How well would they grow near Seattle, WA? Do they require anything out of the ordinary? Are their any other varietals that you would recommend?