Raisins in place of white granulated sugar
 

Hello-

I'm looking at making a Red using a Red wine Concentrate. It calls for 8 cups of white granulated sugar in the recipe. I'm thinking of substituting 6 lbs of raisins (ground up in a bag) for the sugar, and keeping everything else per the recipe. Does anyone see a problem with this, or have other recommendations?

Thank you for any suggestions.

That sounds pretty good to me, actually! It might be hard to get a really accurate OG because the raisins may not give up their sugars right away. The raisins are a body booster, that's for sure, and I use about a pound of them in several wines to give depth of flavor and body. Dark raisins are fine for a dark wine, but for white wines I use golden raisins.

Thanks for the quick reply. I read many of your post, so it give me confidence that you don't think I'm way off base.

I'm making an Amarone kit wine right now, which ferments for a week, then adds in an additional 900g of corn sugar to bump the SG backup by .010-.015 for a second fermentation. I'm thinking I'll probably do the same with this "raisin" batch to get the ABV up a bit.