Red Balloon Wine

This is a simple recipe for 1 gallon of red hillbilly wine.
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Recipe:

3 cans frozen grape concentrate
1 cup sugar
water
yeast







Sanitize all equipment. Put sugar, grape juice concentrate, and water into one gallon sanitized container. Shake up until sugar is dissolved. Add yeast. Slap on balloon with pinholes. Ferment.

Tips:

1.) Use wine yeast, and a read wine yeast like pasteur red if you can.
2.) Once fermentation is done/almost done, put a new balloon on without pinholes; it keeps more oxygen out.
3.) Make sure the juice doesn't have preservatives, they might kill off the yeast. Welch's grape juice concentrate has worked fine for me in the past.

Fermentation will likely last 10 to 15 days at room temperature. Give the wine longer to clear. Rack if desired, bottle when desired.

Hillbilly Wine (Hooch)

24 oz frozen, concentrated grape juice
2.5 cups sugar
water
wine yeast







Add concentrate to sanitized one-gallon vessel. Add sugar. Bring to one gallon with water (make sure there's some headroom, this recipe tends to foam up a little on the first day). Add wine yeast, shake, fit with airlock and let there be wine!

12 to 16 days later fermentation should cease. You can now rack the wine into a new vessel. Fit with airlock. After one month you can bottle! (one month is conservative)

Notes: You don't want to add your yeast to a very cold mixture of grape juice, so either let the concentrate reach room temperature before you begin, or add warm water to make one gallon. A good temperature to add the yeast in at is NO HIGHER THAN 110 degrees (43 degrees Celsius). Also, you don't need a fancy airlock, especially if you're just beginning, a balloon fitted over the top of the vessel is just fine, you may want to put a pinprick or two in the balloon so that a little of the carbon dioxide can escape as fermentation occurs (yes, don't forget, your yeasts are eukaryotes just like people, and as they go about their day making wine, they "breathe" out CO2 just like people!) Airlocks are very cheap, though, ranging from $1.50 to $5.00 at your home brew store locally or online.

Note number two: be careful which concentrated grape juice you buy. The store brand, and even some name brands, likely have either high-fructose corn syrup and/or preservatives. Preservatives can and will hurt your yeast, or even prevent fermentation, and high-fructose corn syrup is not from grapes, and it's not sucrose, our regular table sugar. Preservatives to watch out for are anything with sulfur, but if you see citric acid, that's just fine. Basically, look for the most natural, simple labels, something with 100% grape juice.

Well, this is as simple as it gets. This was my first wine, not bad, but don't expect a prize-winner either! This is a really fun and simple way to get started on wine-making, and even if you screw it all up, you're only out a few dollars, so there's no excuse not to try!

Related Recipes: Easy Apple Cider, White Hillbilly Wine, Easy Mead.