Watermelon wine

jkrug · Sep 10, 2015

I have 3 gals of watermelon wine that i am ready to add flavoring to. I have frozen some additional watermelon to juice. All i have done is thaw it and juice it to throw in jars. If i add the juice will this spoil eventually and ruin the wine? With all the effort i have put into this I dont want to ruin it. Any opinions are appreciated.

barbiek · Sep 11, 2015

I would add k-meta when juicing spoilage is a BIG concern with watermelon plus add a lil watermelon flavoring to it too.Curious .. Does it have much flavor to it?

jkrug · Sep 11, 2015

Not alot. Gonna add simple syrup to it to help bring watermelon flavoring through.

BernardSmith · Sep 11, 2015

Not sure how long the watermelon juice has been thawed so this may not work (because of the risk of spoilage) but what I might do is after freezing the juice allow it to thaw but as it thaws draw off the liquid from the frozen ice. You want to collect about 1/3 of the total juice (if you froze say 6 pints you collect 2 pints as it thaws. That 1/3 will contain about half the total sugar so you will have concentrated the sugar and the flavor but you will have concentrated this by freezing rather than cooking. (the sugars will thaw and liquefy first). The less liquid you allow to collect the more concentrated the flavor and the sugars will be.
But at about 1/3 collected what's left is more or less frozen water...
Again, I am hesitant to suggest that you do this this go around because you have already thawed the frozen juice once and the process I am talking about would require that you re-freeze the juice... but yer pays yer money and yer takes yer chance...

jkrug · Sep 15, 2015

Squeezing the juice out seem to have worked. The flavor still is not there though. Should I try watermelon extract? Would it hurt anything?

Julie · Sep 15, 2015

Yes I would try the extract, it definitely won't hurt it.

knifemaker · Sep 16, 2015

Go really light on the extract, make several small test samples with varying amounts of extract to start, and start tasting, most of the extracts that I have tried are really synthetic tasting and I've found that it doesn't take very much to ruin a batch of wine. Dale.