Making Wine from Grocery Store Table Grapes

[mpdeem]

My first forays into winemaking from grapes is limited to seedless table grapes from my local grocery store. Varieties available are Flame Grape, Kermit the Frog Green Grapes, and Black-Dark Burgundy skinned grapes (w/ dark burgundy flesh).

Overall results and notes:

-Grape must brix lower than typical wine grapes, isially requiring addition of sugar/simple syrup. PH om 3.74-3.40 depnding on variety.
-Fermentation - can we say super short, lasting maybe 2-4 days no skin contact. With skin contact can extend to 5-7 especially with black variety grapes and rehydrated black raisins.

-Young Wine from green or flame grapes no skin contact when finished fermenting and dry has a pink grapefruit taste. Reminds me of a Mimosa coktail made with cheap Champagne or still white wine (depending on type of yeast used). More complex when fermentation is halted a day early when some residual sugar remains. PH tends to be on lower side.

-Young Wine with skin contact, made from black grapes with longer maceration as a red wine. Inlcuides addition of rehydrated black raisins. Much more complex probably my favorite thus far. Rehydrated raisins make the difference. Got the idea on this forum from the wonderful Tweaking Cheap Wine Kits thread where raisins were added to enhance flavors.
Having said this, like the no skin contact version, there is a similar grapefuit note albeit not as dominant. Again my preferance tastewise is one day prior to end of fermentation. PH is not as low as no skin contact version. Have had success with little backsweetening.

Since ordering wine grapes (even as frozen must) is not in my budget at the moment, I mist content myself with grocery store table grape experiments for now. I do have a Pinot Grigio wine kit in progress - which provides quite a contrast thus far in results and challenges like much longer fermentation almost stalled because I forgot to water down juice concentrate-duh. Comparing to the wine kit I realize that like all things, good proper ingrediants is most of the battle. Thus I have adjusted my expectations and am just using table grapes until I am can afford to order some frozen wine grape must.

Would love to hear from others who have made wine from grocery store grapes. Tips tricks or 'what not to do' tips appreciated/ This is just for fun - to gain expierence and try different techniques. The one good thing about humblegrocery stpre grapes is one is more inclined to get adventerous. No pressure not to mess up. Having said that with the price of groceries these days, one can still end up spending a chunk of change....so not sure how many more grocery store grape experiments I will do in the future.
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[Rice_Guy]

I have done a big red wine with mulberry. What is missing between fruit x and your target wine? acid? color? tannin? sugar? aromatics? Looking at that with the mulberry I loaded it up with the maximum recommended grape tannin and then enough acid to drop the pH.

Basically grape wine is an acidic solution near pH 3.5 which has enough sugar to make 11 or even 14% alcohol. Table grapes are short on tannin and maybe color.

 

[winechef]

I think a nice country fruit wine would be better flavor than table grapes. they lack character. but mullbery, blueberry, or a mixed blueberry BlackBerry strawberry raspberry wine would definitely be better.

add extra tannins and use good oak chunks and you'll have a much better wine.

but if grapes are your only passion I'd save up. to. make a batch with high quality grapes

 

[BPL]

Using grocery store grapes and fruit is a great way to ease into fine tuning methods. Yes, I started out that way as well. I made some pretty good table wine in the process. I quickly found out that not all table grapes >should be< destined for wine.

I realized there was a cost versus quantity consideration. Considering ~10 lbs of grapes will net 1 gallon of finished wine is a starting point example. If the fruit is $2/lb, it cost ~$20 for the juice. Since table grapes are low in sugar, the gravity needs to be "fixed". So the cost of juice + sugar for the finished wine goes up to ~$25 to $30 per gallon. At $30/gallon, each bottle (5 bottles) costs roughly $5 to $6. The cost per bottle is variable, depending sourced fruit costs. The cost increases is for any additives.

Comparing the juice/sugar cost to the average cost of a 6 gallon Wine Expert kit of ~$90 where the result is 30 bottles. No additives or extra sugar is needed. Everything comes in the kit. The cost per bottle becomes ~$3/bottle, roughly 1/2 of the fresh store bought grapes. The other benefit of using a kit is the labor is reduced from juicing the grapes.

I'll still make wine from store bought fruit, but my "break point" of making it worthwhile is finding free fruit or finding sales at ~$1.50/lb or less.

In the long run, I've found that my experience gained from using table grapes accelerated the experiences needed to take a higher end kit and turn it into an exceptional wine. "Exceptional" meaning, better than most all purchased wines from a liquor store and I can shape the tastes to my liking.