Fig wine: what is fig wine, exactly?

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At the same time, fig wine itself is a thing and has been drunk in the Southeastern part of the Mediterranean for centuries. Most fruits can be made into wine with fermentation, and fig wine remains a little-spoken of countryside homebrew. The reason is simply that there is so little of it: it takes a lot of figs to make one bottle of deliciously sweet fig wine.

The ‘confusion’ surrounding fruit wines comes from the fact that classic grape wines often develop fruity aromas and notes. You’ll find fig tastes in particular in full-bodied and oak-aged Merlots from Argentina, as well as certain Portuguese field blends that have a natural dried-fruit flavor.

Wine Made out of Fruits: Can You Make Wine out of Any Fruit?

Winemaking is, simply put, all about fermentation, which turns sweet juice into alcohol. In principle, you can make wine out of any kind of fruit juice as long as it’s sweet enough. This is why in spring, when the temperatures fluctuate, you often find birds getting ‘drunk’ and flying into windows when eating fruits and berries that the cold-and-warm temperatures make alcoholic.

The magic of fermentation is something humans have been fascinated with for millennia, but nowadays making fruit wine at home has become a new-found interest of many young chefs and foodies. What’s more fun than to come to dinner with a bottle of your own homemade fig wine, after all?

Can you make alcohol from figs?

When it comes to figs, however, the process is not too simple. Finding a local supplier may be a better option.

In contrast to grapes that are naturally sweet and have a high water and acid content (necessary for the yeast interaction that starts the fermentation process), figs only become sweet when harvested very late.

They’re often also dried after harvesting, meaning that you need a large fig harvest to make juice that is sweet enough to lead to fermentation. Most home recipes for fig wine also suggest that you add sugar, a faux pas in classic wine making, even when it comes to making wine out of fruit.

Because of the figs’ delicate flavor, the fig wine requires aging for at least a year or two, making it very much a long-term project popular mainly amongst young fruit wine producers, who often combine the figs with cranberries and dates to enrich the flavors.

Fig wine vs classic wine

The lower levels of acid and sugar in figs, compared to grapes, does not only require a later harvest and longer fermentation process – it also means that the final wine often ends up having a higher percentage of residual sugar, similar to wine made out of dried grapes (raisins) and other heavily sweet wines.

A traditional, albeit even more difficult, way of making fig wine is to dry out the figs in the sun before the fermentation. This makes a fig wine most comparable to the sweetest of sweet wines, such as late harvest wines, or perhaps a Royal late harvest Tokaji from Hungary.

Fig notes in classic wines, on the other hand, develop primarily in heavy red wines, and most often on the nose. These wines are quite dissimilar to wine made out of figs, as their low levels of residual sugar means that one of our main tasting notes, sweetness, is of a completely different quality.

Wines with Fig Notes

In classic winemaking, a rule of thumb is that fig notes and the spicy undertones that they come with are a sign of a well-aged wine, developed from aging and long-lasting oxidation. Conversely, a young wine with fig notes should be consumed earlier rather than later as continuing oxidation (in other words, ageing) would give it overpowering notes of leather and earthiness. Exceptions to this rule include Portuguese blends from grapes with high acidity, whose flavors are known for their resistance, and a handful of others.

Therefore, wines with fig notes tend to be full-bodied and fortified; there are, however, certain Sauvignon blanc wines from California that will give you the somewhat lighter option to this bold flavor.