Making Wine From Grapes At Home

Can you furnish a grape wine recipe for 5 gallons of Cynthiana grape wine?
Name: Dennis T.
State: GA
Hello Dennis,
Making wine from grapes is more of a process than a recipe. This is true regardless if you are a winery or just an individual making grape wine at home. It’s different than making wine from a fruits like blueberries or peaches where you can follow a wine recipe to make the wine.
The primary reason for this difference is that when you are making wine from grapes you are using 100% grape juice. No water is being add to the grape juice. This means that a change in sweetness or acidity from one season to the next affects what’s needed in the grape wine recipe, dramatically.
This is not so much the case when making a batch of raspberry wine, for example. The actual raspberry juice may only represent about a fifth of the liquid that’s in the wine. The rest is water, so the amount of ingredients such as Acid Blend, sugar, etc. are somewhat predictable, regardless of how sweet or acidic the raspberries are. These amounts can be packaged up neatly and put into a wine recipe.
So what does this mean for the person making wine from grapes at home? It means that they will need to test the grapes they have at hand to know how much of the wine ingredients to add.
Some wine ingredients will be constant regardless of the grapes. This applies to yeast nutrient, pectic enzyme, potassium metabisulfite and wine yeast. With each of these items simply follow the amounts called for on the containers they came in.
But with sugar, Acid Blend and wine tannin, the amounts will vary based on tests you will give the grape juice. For sugar you will take a hydrometer reading; for Acid Blend you will take an acid test reading; and for tannin you will take a litmus reading with pH papers.
Dennis, we have a great article on our website that covers making wine with grapes. This info will help you to add the correct wine ingredients in the correct amounts so that you can come up with the best Cynthiana grape wine possible.
Happy Winemaking,
Ed Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.