Hello Kraus,

I would like to know if wine can be made from Welch’s grape juice that you buy at your local grocery store if you use yeast and go through the process of wine making? Will the Welch’s grape juice ferment into wine?

Curtis
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Hello Curtis,

As a beginning winemaker, using Welch’s grape juice is a great way to learn how to make your own wine. The resulting wine may not necessarily be prize-winning, but it will be well worth the effort.

The really neat part about it is you can make a few gallons of grape wine without having to worry about crushing the grapes and dealing with using a grape presses. You will still need, however, regular wine making materials such as wine yeast, yeast nutrient, wine tannin, etc.

You can use other brands besides Welch’s. The main thing to remember is that the grape juice can not have any preservatives that would interfere with a fermentation. Examples of these would be: sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate. All of Welch’s products are fine for fermentation.

Here’s a basic Welch’s grape wine recipe. It is for making one gallon. If you want to make 5 gallons, just times everything by 5, expect for the yeast. Each packet of yeast is good for 1 to 5 gallons of wine:

Welch’s Grape Juice Wine Recipe (1 Gallon)
2- 64 oz. Welch’s Grape Juice
1/2- lb. Cane Sugar
1- Package of Yeast (Red Star Montrachet)
1- Teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
3/4 – Teaspoon Acid Blend
1/8 – Teaspoon Grape Tannin

If you prefer, you can use Welch’s Frozen Concentrate, you can do that as well. Just reconstitute the Welch’s concentrate with water as the directions from Welch’s indicate, and start from there.

You can follow the 7 Easy Steps To Making Wine that are listed on our website. We also have other wine recipes you can use with these Easy Steps on our Wine Recipe Page.

This should be all the info you need to make some Welch’s grape wine. If you have any other questions just let us know.

Happy Wine Making,
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.

I have almost 4 gallons of Scuppernong grape juice that I’ve gotten with my steam juicer this year. I would like to know how to make Scuppernon grape wine with it. I was needing to know how much water to add to it. I would like to know what other wine making materials/ingredients I will need. I already have equipment. Can you help me with a Scuppernong grape wine recipe?
Thanks Fred
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Hello Fred,
If you were making wine with actual wine grapes you would use 100% grape juice. This means if you have 5 gallons of juice, you make 5 gallons of wine. However, this is not the case with Scuppernong grapes. Their flavor is much stronger and more acidic. The Scuppernong juice needs to be diluted with water for these reasons.
Most Scuppernong grape wine recipes you run across will call for about 30 to 50 pounds of grapes to make a 5 gallon batch. This equates to about 2 or 3  gallons of juice. This is what I also suggest you use to make 5 gallons – 2 or 3 gallons of the Scuppernong juice.
If you want to get more accurate, you can purchase and acid testing kit and keep diluting the Scuppernong juice until the acidity drops to an acceptable level. This would be somewhere between .60% to .70% acidity. The directions that come along with the acid test kit will help you through the testing.
In an average growing season this should take about a ratio of 3 gallons water to 2 gallons of Scuppernong juice. Sometimes it can be equal part, 2.5 gallons water to 2.5 gallons of juice. Keep adding the water and testing the acidity until you reach at least the .70% acidity.
Because you have diluted the Scuppernong juice with water, you have also diluted the sugar concentration of the wine must. Sugar is what turns into alcohol during a fermentation. If there is not enough sugar in the wine must, there will not be enough alcohol in the wine when the fermentation is done. You will need to add sugar to keep the fermentation’s potential alcohol in a normal range. I would suggest adding 2-1/4 pounds of cane sugar for every gallon of water you use. This should get you a wine with about 12% to 14% alcohol.
A more accurate way of controlling your wine’s alcohol content is to use a wine hydrometer. One of the scales on a wine hydrometer is called potential alcohol. This scale will tell you how much alcohol can be made with the sugar that is currently in the wine must. You just keep adding and dissolving sugar into the wine must until the potential alcohol scale reads the alcohol level you’d like to have. This is a limit to how much alcohol wine yeast can make. For this reason do not shoot for an alcohol level higher than 13%.
Other ingredients you will need to add for the Scuppernong grape wine recipe are as follows:

• Yeast Nutrient (1 teaspoon per gallon)
• Pectic Enzyme (1/8 teaspoon per gallon)
• Wine Tannin (1/4 teaspoon per gallon)
• Campden Tablets (1 crushed tablet per gallon. Add 24 hour before adding yeast)
• Wine Yeast (1 packet for every 1 to 5 gallons, Recommended: Lalvin K1V-1116)

If you need more information about how to go about making the wine, you might want to take a look at How To Make Wine that is on our website. It will give you a good overall run-down of what you need to do to finish this Scuppernong grape wine recipe.
Happy Wine Making,
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.

You can never have too many fruit wine recipes, so here’s one I thought you might like to try.
Part of the fun of making your own wine comes from the fact that you get be a little creative when making them – to let your experimental-side flourish a little. That’s exactly how this particular wine recipe came into being.
Last year I was thinking about different fruits and how their flavors differ and how some attack the palate in completely different ways than other. After thinking through the different fruit wines I have made and tasted, I came up with this fruit wine recipe.
My goal was to end up with a fruit wine with an array of flavors that complimented one another… a homemade wine that was pleasant and well balanced.

Bananaberry Wine Recipe

• 6 lbs. Peeled & Sliced Bananas
• 3 lbs. Crushed Blackberries
• 6 lbs. Chopped Strawberries
• 10-1/2 lbs. Cane Sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon Pectic Enzyme
• 5 teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
• 2-1/2 tablespoon Acid Blend
• 1 Pkg. Wine Yeast: Lalvin D-47 (recommended)
• Water to total batch to 5 gallons

Making this wine off-dry, with a little bit of sweetness with bring out its fruitiness much more clearly. Essentially, you can do this by adding sugar and potassium sorbate at bottling time to taste. You can find more details about making the wine sweeter by taking a look at Making Sweet Wines listed on our website. You don’t necessarily need to make the wine sweet — unless you want to — but taking it away from being completely dry will open up the fruit flavors, significantly.
For the basic directions on how to make this wine, follow the 7 Easy Steps To Making Wine at the following link to our web site:
Happy Wine Making,
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.

One of the most rewarding wines I’ve ever made was a sweet cherry wine. In general, cherry wine tends to be rich and robust in its overall character. The tartness is mellow from the malic acid that dominates the cherry family. The tannins are firm giving the wines made with it a wonderful structure and body.
The one I made a couple of years ago from the sweet cherry wine recipe below turned out exceptional. It took a few months to age, but once it came around, turns out, it was well worth the wait.
The cherry flavor came through nice and fruity and lingered into a rich, earthy aftertaste. It had layers of flavor that you do not always expect in a fruit wine. Some of this I attribute to the brown sugar called for in this wine recipe. Some of it I attribute to the fruit acids. The Lalvin RC-212 that was used in this cherry wine recipe could have helped out in this department, as well.
Since spring is here it won’t be long before cherries will be in full-swing, so I thought this would be a great time to share it on the blog. The cherries you use can make a difference. As its name implies, you want to be sure to use sweet cherries as opposed to sour cherries. According to my notes, I used a mix of Bing and Lambert cherries, but there are many other varieties of cherries that I’m sure would work.

Sweet Cherry Wine Recipe
(Makes 5 Gallons)
18 lbs. Sweet Cherries (pitted)
9 lbs. Cane Sugar
3 lbs. Brown Sugar
1 tbsp. Yeast Energizer
Pectic Enzyme (as directed on the package)
2-1/2 tsp. Tartaric Acid
2-1/2 tsp. Citric Acid
1 Packet Lalvin RC-212 Wine Yeast
10 Campden Tablets (5 before fermentation, 5 before bottling)

This is a fairly straightforward sweet cherry wine recipe, so for the most part all you need to do is following the basic 7 wine making steps on our website. The only thing different that you should take note of is that the cherries need to be pitted. You do not want the pits in with the fermentation. Also, you do not want to over process the cherries. This can cause the wine to be too bitter. Cutting the cherries in half as you pit them is sufficient. If you are using a cherry pitter, all you need to do is lightly crush the cherries after they are pitted.
I also like to pre-dissolve the brown sugar whenever it’s called for in any wine recipe. This can easily be done by taking 2-parts water and 1-part brown sugar and heating it on the stove until liquid. You will need to stir continuously at first so that the sugar does not burn on the bottom of the pan.
Even if you only make 2 or 3 batches of wine each year, I would urge you to give the sweet cherry wine recipe a go. It makes a remarkable wine that it hard not to like. It’s also pretty easy to make. And as always, you can make it as sweet or as dry as you like, by back-sweetening the wine to taste.
Happy Wine Making,
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.

How about making some dandelion wine with the dandelion wine recipe below?
Most of the changes that spring brings are well received, like: warmth, sunshine, longer days, but there are a few changes that are not as welcomed. For most, the dreaded dandelion falls into this latter category. That’s why for some, making a bit of dandelion wine might strangely feel like a bit of revenge. Below is a dandelion wine recipe to help exact your revenge.
Dandelion wine is one of those traditional wines that has long served as a symbol of country winemaking – that classic wine creation that comes from the little ol’ winemaker everybody knows. Even though dandelion wine has a deep-rooted past in American culture, there are plenty of home winemakers still making it today and enjoying every bit of it.
So, what does dandelion wine taste like, you ask? This dandelion wine recipe makes a light-bodied wine with a beautiful yellow color. It’s flavors are herbal and muddled with an incredible bouquet that is bright and full of herbs and flowers.
The trick to making a good dandelion wine is to use the dandelion petals, only. Stay away from any of the green. The greens will add a vegetable-like character to the wine that will seem foreign and out of place.
Spring is the perfect time to make some dandelion wine, so here’s a 5 gallon dandelion wine recipe to get you going. It’s not that different from other country wine recipes. The types of ingredients are basically the same. A double-shot of nutrient is needed to make up for the lack of nutrients that you would normal get when making a wine from fruit. Plenty of acid blend is need as well for the same reason. Dandelions are not high in nutrients or acid.
You can vary the amount of dandelion petals quite a bit without affecting the rest of the dandelion wine recipe, but as a warning, adding to many petals could give you a wine the has a very hard time aging out into something you’d really want to drink. More petals is not necessarily better. While the wine recipe asks for 6 quarts, you could reasonably go up to 10 quarts.

Dandelion Wine Recipe
(Makes 5 Gallons)

• 6 qts. Dandelion Petals
• 11 lbs. Cane Sugar
• 1 tbsp. Yeast Nutrient
• 2 tsp. Yeast Energizer 
• 3 tbsp. Acid Blend
• 1/2 tsp. Wine Tannin
• 1 pkt. Wine Yeast (Lalvin: K1V-1116)
• 10 Campden Tablets (5 before fermentation / 5 at bottling)

Making this dandelion wine is pretty straight-forward. You will want to be sure that the dandelions are herbicide and pesticide free. For this reason it is best to pick them from an area you are familiar with. Once you have petals together, you will want to wash them in cold water – remove any ants or other insects – then blanch them by pouring boiling water over them and letting them steep in the water for 5 minutes. Don’t use any more boiling water then necessary. Be sure to use all the water from the blanching in the dandelion wine recipe, itself, as part of the 5 gallons.
Once you’ve gotten this far you can use the 7 Easy Steps To Making Wine as the instructions for making this dandelion wine recipe.
Anyone else have a dandelion wine recipe they’d like to share? Just leave it in the comments below!
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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.

If you’ve never made wine before, I would submit to you that making a blueberry wine is a perfect place to start.
For one, blueberry wine is any easy wine to make. And, it only requires the most elementary pieces of wine making equipment. Secondly, it makes an INCREDIBLE wine. Blueberries, quite frankly, are well suited to making wine. The flavors come through fruity and bright.
Secondly, it’s springtime and blueberry season is just around the corner, so what better time to get your ducks-in-a-row and everything squared-away, so that when they do come in you’ll have exactly what you need and know what to do.
The blueberry wine recipe below is very simple to use. All you need are the ingredients listed and to follow the basic wine making directions that’s are on our website. The blueberries can be fresh or frozen. Either way will work equally well in the recipe.
To prepare the blueberries all that is required is that the berries be lightly crush. You can do this by hand, or you could use something like a potato masher. You do not want to crush the berries too much, and you definitely do not want to break any seeds. This could unnecessarily add a bitterness to the wine.

Ed’s Blueberry Wine Recipe
(Makes 5 Gallons)
13 lbs. Blueberries (lightly crushed)
11 lbs. Cane Sugar (table sugar)
1 tbsp. Yeast Energizer
Pectic Enzyme (as directed on its package)
2 tbsp. Acid Blend
Red Star Montrachet Wine Yeast
10 Campden Tablets (5 before to fermentation, 5 before bottling)

One of the fun thing about making your own wine is that you get to make it as sweet or as dry as you like. If you do nothing more than follow the directions, you will end up with a dry blueberry wine. But if you want to make a sweet wine, you can sweeten the blueberry wine to taste just before bottling. Just remember, if doing so, to also add potassium sorbate along with the Campden tablets called for in the blueberry wine recipe.
Now, doesn’t that sound simple? I imagine the hardest part is keeping your patience in tact. Be sure the fermentation has completed and give it plenty of time to clear up before bottling. Once in the bottle, realize that aging the wine will dramatically improve its quality over the first couple of 3 months. After that drink up.
If you need wine making equipment to make the wine, the “Your Fruit!” wine making kit is taylor-made for making this blueberry wine recipe. Not only does it have the equipment you’ll need, but it also has plenty of the basic wine making ingredients for making many different kinds of wine – all at a discounted price.

If you could take springtime and put it into a bottle you would most likely end up with something close to a strawberry wine. For me, strawberry wine is the very essence of spring. Its flavor is bright and fresh. Its aroma is floral and sweet. As far as I’m concerned strawberry wine represents all things spring quite well.
If fresh strawberries are not already available in your area, they will be soon. With that in mind here is a strawberry wine recipe that you can use to get your springtime groove on. It’s a wine recipe I have used several times with great results. I couldn’t think of a better time to share it than right now!

Strawberry Wine Recipe
(5 Gallons)
19 lbs. Strawberries
10 lbs. Cane Sugar (1.090)
4 Tsp. Acid Blend 
5 Tsp. Yeast Nutrient
1/2 Tsp. Wine Tannin
Pectic Enzyme (as directed on package)
1/4 Tsp. Potassium Metabisulfite (or 5 Campden Tablets)
Wine Yeast (recommend Lalvin 71B-1122)
10 Campden Tablets (5 before fermentation, 5 before bottling)

You can use the basic wine making directions that are on our website for making this strawberry wine recipe. Just be sure to remove any stem or green parts of the strawberry before using. You do not need to crush the strawberries. Just give them a coarse chopping. The strawberries will breakdown and release all their goodness during the fermentation.
One variation I have done a couple of time when making this is to exchange 2 pounds of the sugar for 3 pounds of raspberry spun honey. This exchange will keep your starting specific gravity about the same. The raspberry honey will intensify the sweet, perfume-y bouquet this wine likes to give. Essentially, it’s giving you more of one of the features that makes strawberry wine so great.
Another great thing about making this strawberry wine recipe is that it does not need much aging. So many wines are consumed before they reach their best simply because they need so much aging. Fortunately, that’s not the case with making strawberry wine.
I would not attempt to bulk-age the wine for any length of time, at all. Give it plenty of time to clear, but after that go straight into the wine bottles. Once in the bottles, give your strawberry wine at least one month to develop its bouquet. It will taste its best at around 4 to 6 months. Don’t let it sit around for any more than 1 year. Drink up!
Do you have a strawberry wine recipe you’d like to share with other home winemakers? Just leave it in the comments below. We’d love to see what you’ve got cookin’!
Happy Wine Making,
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.