Wine Making

Has anyone on here made wine before? I am making a batch out of crabapples right now, and man does it take alot of those little suckers to make a gallon. Just wondering if any of you have ever used store boughten grapes or strawberries to do this. I got started a little late this year in harvesting and it seems I cannot find near enough wild grapes to make it worth while, so i thought maybe just buying some tame ones and mixing the two together and alsotrying to make a batch with tame ones. Any help or suggestions will be greately appreciated.

It can be done. But it’s not going to turn out as good as fresh grapes. The color is a little brownish and the taste is off.

Drinkable…certainly! Would I recommend it? No…unless you don’t have any other choice.

I just picked three bags full of concords and shipped them home with the Favorite Mom…I talked her into making jelly this year.

You can make wine with any frozen concentrate (apple, grape, cranberry etc.) as long as it doesn’t have any preservatives in it. You can also make apple wine from the apple juice you get from orchards that press their own windfalls and excess. Just make sure you add camden tablets to it and let it stand for I believe 24 hours before adding your yeast. Wine making is a very interesting hobby. The finished product most of the time makes for a “happy” ending. With the exception of beet wine.

Grocery store grapes can be used but are really low in sugar and tannins and acid. They will make a thin wine and cost a lot of $. It will take something on the order of 15 pounds per gallon.

Apple juice makes a nice fruit wine base (something to add to fruit you want to ferment), but is a little weak all by itself. Much better as a cider.

Frozen juice concentrates work well, but you usually gotta buy the good stuff. Look at the label, if you see “high fuctose corn syrup” in the first couple of ingredients you’re wasting your time and money. Corn sugar is cheap, what you want is pure fruit juice concentrate. The wine will come out like you want.

One thing to keep in mind with buying fruit at the store is that it’s often picked unripe and shipped many hundreds or thousands of miles. I have not had much luck making wine from most grocery fruit. It usually tastes very dull.
I try to hit the local stands near the end of the season when they are glutted with dead ripe produce. Ask the person working there. Many times if you want to buy 15 pounds of fruit you get a nice deal.

Check out these brewing websites. They sell fresh packed fruit for cheap.

midwestsupplies.com
northernbrewer.com

Good luck.

I recommend a home-made wheat wine!

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I recommend a home-made wheat wine!

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Will the recipe follow?? I hope so.

I’ll have to dig it up from my older brother.
He took our grandmother’s recipe and kinda goofed it up…….The wine ended up being about 50-proof, but we didn’t realize it until we each had about 6 of those “tasty, dang-good” glasses of wine.

And it was actually quite taste too!