Wine from supermarket juice?

[me!]

Delurking to ask a stupid question...

Local supermarket was selling apple juice at a bargain price, so I thought I could make some apple wine without all that tedious chopping and promply bought 5 litres of the stuff (in my head: 1 gallon + some for topping up as necessary). It now occurs to me that when I made wine from actual apples, I didn't use pure juice but added a fair amount of water, so my question is - should I use this juice neat? Or would that be ridiculous and it will need diluted?

On the label:

Ingredients:
Apple Juice from Concentrate (100%)

Nutrition
Typical Values 100ml contains 150ml contains
Energy 205kJ (48kcal) 308kJ (72kcal)
Fat 0.1g 0.2g
of which Saturates <0.1g <0.1g
Carbohydrate 11.4g 17.1g
of which Sugars 11.4g 17.1g
Fibre <0.1g <0.1g
Protein 0.1g 0.2g
Salt <0.01g <0.01g

Any advice greatly appreciated :)

thanks

[ina]

Sorry, can't help - never made wine from bought juice; but there are others on here who know more about wine making...

Just wanted to say hello and good on you for delurking!

[me!]

Thanks Ina :)

[Marc]

I'm surprised you haven't had more replies to this.
I'm not an expert, but cider is made from pure juice, so if you use it neat then you should get cider :) - if you do that then don't add much sugar.
I'd dilute it and make apple wine myself. 2 to 1 or maybe 4 to 1. If you did 4 parts water you'd get less concentrated flavour (which I generally prefer in a wine) and would need to add more sugar, around 1 kilo or a bit more to the (gallon) demijohn.
Less water, less sugar - as there will be quite a bit in the juice. You should be able to work out the amount needed from the figures that you give if you're clever - I'm not so I'd guess :D

[me!]

Thanks Marc. Diluted it is, then! Which means I have enough to try different concentrations and see which I like best... :)

[geordie]

I don't want to steal others work, but if you google "wine from supermarket juice" there are loads or recipes.

I tried it once and it wasn't quite right, for the cost I would just buy a kit, we have been making youngs merlot for years, 22L kit mix with 4 kilos of sugar, works out just over a quid a litre and the includes every thing, no need to buy separate stabilisers etc .

Last summer we got 50lbs of bramble fruit in 3 trips to a disused railway line, made 50l of wine (and a coupe of crumbles!) I reckon we were down to just over 20p a litre for that, just started drinking it recently!

[me!]

Aye, I plan to do bramble when the time comes but in the meantime I just thought cheap juice + empty demijohn = why not? Got to be worth a try :D

[Andy Hamilton]

I've experimented with loads of different juices, you can water down but too much and you loose body and acidity. Orange juice is the most "interesting" and some of the more fancy juices work a treat. The darker juices I think work better, but apple yep great cheats cider.

[dave45]

I have made loads of apple wine and cider from my own apples. Apple juice is apple juice wherever it comes from. If you ferment the straight juice with a general purpose yeast you will get a probably cloudy dry cider, probably around 4-5%. Measure the juice's specific gravity with a hydrometer before you add the yeast and use the alcohol tables on the internet to work it out If you want a clear dry cider add a spoonful of pectolase per gallon at the start to turn the haze-forming pectin into fermentables.

If you want to make a slightly sweeter cider, go on ebay and look for "cider yeast" - it has yeast, nutrient and (artificial) non-fermentable sweetener in it. Tried it. It works. or you could just add your favourite sweetener, saccharine, aspartame or whatever.

Coz if you just add sugar, it will simply ferment out and increase the alcohol content and you'll end up with Apple wine, which could be just what you want. How much sugar? use your hydrometer and those alcohol tables again. The max alcohol you will get depends on the strain of yeast and temperature conditions, nutrients and other stuff. If you get it wrong you could end up with a sickly-sweet wine. You can always add extra sugar, but you can't subtract it.

So I prefer to add the additional sugar in stages and check its fermented out before adding more... Labour intensive, though. If you want a medium or sweet wine you'll have to add just the right amount of sugar after its at its fermentable limit (difficult to establish except by experiment)

And last year I also messed about mixing batches, to avoid using extra yeast, averaging specific gravities and apple varieties, pouring stuff backwards and forwards, warming it to dissolve sugar etc... and ended up with apple SHERRY.. I am guessing some form of wild yeast gave it the "flor" effect. My mum loved it.

[me!]

Update: I finally got around to doing something with this, decided to dilute it 50/50 so 4 litres juice/4 litres water (with another litre of juice available to top up with), 1.5kg-ish sugar, some tea and some lemon juice, and now have 2 demijohns bubbling away merrily. One more merrily than the other, for some strange reason...

Of course, as soon as my demijohns were unavailable I was given buckets of gooseberries and blackcurrants with nowhere to put them (currently in fermenting buckets but don't know what I'll strain them into!), but that's another thread...

[Green Aura]

I think it's called Sod's Law.

Have a look on Ebay or freecycle (or whatever it's called this week). Folks are often desperate to get rid of their demijohns.

I hope your wine works out well - our efforts with supermarket grape juice was disgusting. Hopefully it cleaned the pipes on its way down the drain.

[me!]

Thanks. I'll cross grape juice off the list then! If this turns out to be a failed experiment, it's only cost me a couple of quid.

Sod's law sounds about right I do have a smaller bucket which I think should just about hold the liquid, once the fruit is removed - at least long enough to clean the bigger bucket, then I can chuck it back in there. Not ideal, I know...

[Green Aura]

Don't be put off by my failures. We seem to have all or nothing - resounding success or gross. I know mkg has had a lot of good wines from juice but unfortunately he's not around at the moment to give advice.

[me!]

Well, I won't be buying more juice anytime soon, I've got plenty of other stuff to be going on with :)

You're right, there do seem to be loads of demijohns out there going free/cheap. Unfortunately none of them are anywhere near me... oh well. I'll just have to improvise :)