Should You Use Fresh Grapes Or Concentrate With Your Wine Making Kit?

One question that a lot of beginning do-it-yourself wine makers ask is whether it’s best to make wine using juice concentrates or to use fresh grapes. While it used to be that you could almost certainly count on producing better wine by using fresh fruit, the quality of juice concentrates as well as the wine making equipment currently available to home winemakers have made the two more or less equal. The biggest factor is rather how experienced of a wine maker you are. Honestly, you could use either and end up with a great homemade wine (or a substandard one). What really matters is that you follow the recipe some basic wine making best practices.

Tips For Beginning Wine Makers

If you’ve just gotten your first set of wine making supplies, then you’ll almost certainly want to use prepackaged juice or juice concentrate to produce your first batch of homemade wine. It’s a wiser choice for the beginning wine maker for one very simple reason: it’s a great deal easier to work with than fresh grapes. It’s also easier and less costly to use concentrates, since not all of us live close to vineyards and even if you do, the grapes you want to use may not be in season. While you can have fruit shipped to you, this can be an expensive proposition and again, the type of grapes you want might not be available when you’re ready to start making wine at home. Also, if you’re just starting out as a wine maker and you have a wine making kit, then you more than likely have some juice concentrate already as part of a sort of starter kit. Many of the better kits come with the ingredients you need to make your first batch. If your kit came with these supplies, by all means, use them – it’s a great way to get a feel for the process of making wine. And if this is your first batch, then you’ll probably be relieved to know that you don’t have to worry about pressing your grapes and all the extra effort involved in making wine from fresh grapes. There will be plenty of opportunities for you to upgrade your wine making equipment and experiment with making wine from grapes later on. As you get started learning about wine making, make things easy for yourself by using concentrate. After all, you don’t really want to trample grapes in your bathtub – at least, not yet!