Muscadine Juice

Hello,
I'm harvesting my muscadines and I have a huge crop. I've been squeezing grapes today and I have very close to 3 gallons of undiluted juice. My question is I am trying to plan my wine and most of the recipies call for 1 quart juice to 3 quarts water - I have a 6 gallon carboy, and I was thinking about getting a couple of smaller ones for this batch, anyway as a ballpark figure can I go to a 1:2 ratio. I dont have a acid test kit but the pure juice is pretty stout. I will probably have a couple more gallons of pure juice before I'm finished- so I dont have to be conservative. Thanks

Kevin

1:2 ratio would be fine.

Hello again / thanks... So I ended up with 4 gallons of juice 1.060 / 15 ball / 8 pa
Per my recipe I added 2.25 pounds of sugar per gallon for a total of 8 gallons... Well I realized I added sugar for a recipe that called for 1 quart juice to 3 quarts water and since I had opted for a 2:1 ratio I decided that I had probably added to much sugar so I added another gallon of water.
Now I have 9 gallons total / 4 gallons of juice and 5 gallons of water and a dang ton of grape peels in a sack floating in my primary (igloo cooler). The resulting must is 1.100 / 24 / 14pa. So do you guys think my numbers are ok or will this turn out to high octane?
Thanks
Kevin

With your SG 1.10 you should get 13-14% ETOH. This is not what I would consider rocket feul. That is what I make all my wines to. I say let it roll.

Outstanding! Then I'm gonna let it do it's thing... One last question - when I was at my not-so local home-brew shop a couple of weeks ago they were out of Montrachet so I picked up red star Pasteur red / what do you think... Should I use the red or maybe go find some Montrachet (they may have it in by now)

Thanks again !!
Kevin

The Pasteur Red will work fine. It will just give a different flavor profile compared to the Montrachet.

I'm into day 2 and my primary is rolling! Surprisingly a lot of heat is coming from the brew... Guess that's what's supposed to happen. I did a SG check and from 1.100 24 / 14 pa
2 days later it's 1.30 8 / 4 percent pa.
Starting to smell like wine. Is this normal?

Good news on not flying solo, I'll follow your thread since you are a few days ahead of me in the process. I just squished my grapes today.

They will be on sale locally this week in my area. Mind telling me where you got your recipe? This will be my first batch from “scratch”.

Howdy - well I racked my wine today - fermentation had really slowed down (no bubbles) so I checked sg and it was 1.000 - so I guess that's as dry as it gets- I tasted it last week and it had a "hot" alcohol taste - today's taste was much better! Still a little worried as the wine is very hazy / but I'll wait a few weeks and see if things clear a bit. My recipe was from the Keller site- if anybody was wondering how I mashed the grapes / I used a cooler (sanitized) then added a good amount of grapes the took a heavy cutting board end side up and started crushing - I had a large amount of muscadines so freezing wasn't an option.. Also this may be of interest to newbies like me - after I mashed the grapes I placed in my mesh bag and squeezed for all I was worth - the pulp of the grape was left and was holding a lot of juice... I decided to put all of this "great goodness" in my primary... After 4 days in the primary with the pectic enzyme and fermentation the must bag was withdrawn. The volume was reduced by half-- all that was left was skins and seeds- easily squeezable... And it increased my juice volume significantly. Thanks for the advice.. I'll let everybody know how it turns out -
Kevin