First wine ever

[Jerramy]

im new to wine, drinking and making it.. ive rarely had occasions where I would drink some cheap wine just for the thrill when I was younger.. Long story short, im attempting to make my first wine now, since I am bored in quarantine.. if I am using 100% juice, should I have added water with it? It is not concentrate.. Additionally, the taste after I racked the first time, was bitter.. cani add sugar to adjust taste?

 

[sour_grapes]

Welcome to WMT!

Tell us what kind of juice you are talking about. Like Welch's grape juice or something like that?

 

[Jerramy]

100% Welch's juice. One is pomegranate with blueberry, which i just started. The other is a berry/fruit mix, still welchs 100% juice..

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Jerramy - and welcome. This is a great hobby. Truly.
Here's my take on your question: any juice that you like to drink as is, is the minimum - and likely maximum concentration you want for the wine. That is to say, if you wouldn't dilute the flavors with water to drink the juice then don't dilute it. BUT there may be occasions when you want to make the juice MORE concentrated, so you might need/want to add sugar. For example, let's say you have some apple juice and you want to make hard cider. The amount of water to sugar in that juice is just about perfect for hard cider - the cider will be about 5% -7% ABV (alcohol by volume). Compare that to beer (about 3%-5%. But if you want apple wine then you need to either remove some of the water or increase the amount of sugar so that the sugar to water doubles. That would mean that instead of the starting gravity being about 1.050, by adding say 1 lb of sugar to every gallon of juice you will increase the gravity to about 1.090 which when all fermented will give you an apple wine of about 12% ABV... (you can also change the sugar to water ratio by freezing the juice and then collecting it as it thaws . The first third you collect will have all the sugar but only 1/3 of the total water... )

 

[sour_grapes]

I agree with @BernardSmith . Let me also try answer the question (as I THINK you are asking it). No, you should not have added any water to your 100% juice. As Bernard says, maybe you wanted to add sugar to increase the ABV, but very unlikely that you would get a better result if you added water vs. not adding water.

 

[hounddawg]

both sour_grapes and benardsmith are both dead on,
Dawg
-

 

[tradowsk]

I've made several batches of Welch's wine, mainly as porch pounders while my better stuff is aging.

You do not need to add water. I usually add some sugar or honey to bump up the ABV, but that's personal choice.

As for the bitter taste you mentioned, young wines that just finished fermenting rarely taste good. Keep it under airlock for a month or so and you will be surprised by the transformation. Time is the biggest component in making fantastic wine.

If you added more sugar now, it would likely start fermenting again since I doubt you got to the yeast tolerance with just juice. If you want to backsweeten, you will need to add a dose of potassium metabisulfite and potassium sorbate. Those will stop the yeast from eating the new sugar you add and allow your wine to stay sweet.