inherited a grape vine

[brandont02]

I am in desperate need of a lot of help. I moved into a new house in the spring and it has a grape vine growing in the back yard. My first thought was homemade wine. My question is will I be able to start this year or not? The vine has been unloved for a while so it is severely overgrown. I do not even know what kind of grapes they are, but they are just starting to turn red. I need to bring some to the extension office in town yet to see if I can get them identified. If I can't get them identified, would it still be pretty easy to make wine out of them?

 

[JohnT]

I do not see why you couldn't make any amount of wine, but I find it not worth my while for less than a gallon.

A gallon would yeild you around 5 bottles of wine.

You say that there is only 1 vine. To make a gallon of wine, you will need around 10 or 11 pounds of grapes. Do you think that you can harvest that much from your vine?

Even if you do not have a full gallon, I would still encourage you to try. The one thing that everybody on this forum have in common is the joy of winemaking.

The hard part is figuring out just when to pick the grapes. Since it is overgrown, this could be rather difficult.

Welcome to the club!

 

[LoneStarLori]

i had the same situation this summer. We moved in last July and saw the vine but there were no grapes. We trimmed it in the winter and had a very good result. Mine turned out to be Mustang grapes which I started a 5 gal batch with. Turns out I didn't have nearly enough grapes, I thin I picked too soon and now I have a thin wine I'm trying to revive.
You are doing the right thing by joining here. I have learned so much! Wish I would have found this forum before I started.

 

[jamesngalveston]

Lori....is the same wine that you wrote about in the long post.....the thick muscadine.

 

[LoneStarLori]

James, yep. It's like Deja Vu. I wish I knew then what I know now.

 

[brandont02]

I don't think I'll have enough to make a batch yet. I might be able to fill a little more than a five gallon bucket now. They are just turning red, which excites me because I love red wines, so I tasted one. It was very tart, I'm guessing from the high acid content in it yet? So I think I'll just watch it the rest of this year and prune it way back this fall so it can grow up and be a great vine next year.

 

[LoneStarLori]

You can always do a smaller one. Maybe try a one or 3 gallon?

 

[irateadidas]

Just getting in to this I bought a house that had 62 year old muscadine. Vines Too many grapes to eat. So I bought a wine making kit and have been playing around with it

 

[LoneStarLori]

62? WOW! I think your going to need a LOT of carboys. It's my first year too and I'm having a blast. It seems to be rather addicting.

 

[irateadidas]

I have to agree with u there so far I have made 10 gal apple. 12 gal strawberry. 10 gal muscadine. 6 gal merlot. And planted black berries and blue berries ..I'm starting to really like this hobby

 

[beardy]

I also inherited some grapes at my new place. 2 vines. One green grape and one red seeded grape. No idea what varieties but based on how edible they were off the vine I'd guess good ol' table grapes. I got about 4 bunches between the 2 vines and the grapes themselves were very small. I plan to prune them later in the year and hopefully next year I'll get better results.