Raisin Wine

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I want to do a 1 gallon batch of Raisin wine but I need a little help.. i have ~3-4 pounds of raisins i bought from sams club I want to use (sun maid i think)..

I want to throw them in the blender with some bottled water and chop em up then put it in the 1.5gallon plastic wine bucket that I have with some sugar and more water

Ill throw in a campden tab and wait a day then stir and pitch. Do I need any other additives?

and How much Sugar/Raisins should I use?.. im kinda dim witted when it comes to wines.

You shouldn't need any campden- most raisins are loaded with sulfites.

I have had a bottle of this wine, but never made it, so I don't know what the SG of the raisins alone are, though!
 
I was right about the sugar extraction from the raisins. I checked my gravity at pitch was 18.5 Brix... today about 24 hours after pitch it was 20.5 Brix and it was plugging away
 
Just found this thread - for a couple of years I have made ginger wine using locally-obtained grape must which is cheap and not great quality (used for making commercial mass-produced grape brandies). I would get 10L of the must and add another 10L of water and 7kg of sugar for sweetness, plus almost 2Kg of ginger and a few lemons and bananas and things, and it has turned out very nice, and I have had to make extra for friends etc.

The grape harvest failed big-time last year due to heavy rains, and my supplies of my favourite winter warmer are running low as I couldn't make it. I am thinking using raisins as a base would be just as good for this. I would also like to avoid using added sugars, and just produce alcohol from the raisins. "Ubermensch" back in 2008 mentioned "20 L batch ... with 5 kg of sultana raisins and no sugar" (that's about 11lb per 5 gallon batch) - others have given somewhat different numbers.

Any idea on what sort of ball park of ratios of raisins to water we need to be in to arrive at a "winey" sort of ABV - 11% or something?
 
I too would like to make 1 gal of this.
could someone please clarify how many lbs of raisins + how much sugar per gal of water = 1 gal of finished wine?
thanks in advance
 
I too would like to make 1 gal of this.
could someone please clarify how many lbs of raisins + how much sugar per gal of water = 1 gal of finished wine?
thanks in advance

Mine was the previous post before yours but I never got round to making this raisin version of my ginger wine. I missed the grapes again this year so I've got to do the raisin thing like NOW if I want it ready for Christmas/New Year.

In answer to your question, I quoted a post that mentioned 11lb of raisins for a 5 gallon batch WITHOUT sugar. The idea being you use enough raisins to get your desired abv without adding unnecessary sugars, since obviously they have as much sugar as your undehydrated grape.

The weight ratio between fresh grapes and raisins is ABOUT 4:1 (perhaps a bit more - Google "raising drying ratio"). So that would suggest that to get your "wine" (raisins + water) for a 19L (5 gallon) batch, around a quarter of that would need to be raisins: 19L = 19kg, i.e. 4.75kg of raisins, or 10.4 lb. That's actually not at all far off the 11lb figure the previous poster gave, so I think we're onto something there.

Note, this of course would be to get a completely dry "white wine" (it wouldn't win any awards, to be sure). I want to make ginger wine, for example, which is pretty sweet. I think this is where backsweetening would come in and I might have to concede it would be easier to just add sugar to taste like OP did, though you could use more raisins of course. The added complication is that the yeast will probably handle plenty more sugar, so you will actually get additional fermentation and to get your desired sweetness you will just end up having to experiment anyway, so maybe all these calculations are pointless and you should just chuck in like 15lb of raisins and take it from there :).
 
Raisins have around 60g of sugar per 100g. To get to 11% AbV in 1 Gallon (~4L) of water you need 700g of sugar fermented dry. So if you add (700g / 0.6) = 1.17kg of raisins to 4l of water (volume will be more than one gallon because the raisins add volume) you end up with 11% AbV.

That's what I just put down too! Keen to see how this goes.
 
sorry to rekindle this forum but I made this wine scaled to 20 liters, it's gone fine so far and it tastes and smells nice. my question is when to strain the raisins off. it's been two weeks now and the Sg reading is not reliable since the must is so thick. will it be problematic if they stay or is two weeks enough?
 
It reminds me of the dry Italian red, Amarone della Valpolicella, which is made of red grapes (Corvina/Rondinella) that are dried for 100+ days on straw mats before fermentation. When the fermentation is stopped early, they get a sweet, red dessert wine called Recioto. The standard raisins are probably even drier and more concentrated and not from wine varietals, but it is a related process anyway.
 
How are you guys measuring the original gravity?
don't the chopped up raisin bits change the reading/floating of the hydrometer?
isn't some of the fermentable sugar segregated away INSIDE the raisin bits?
amber
 
I made a few raisin wines in the past and they all tasted rather astringent, I dunno if its tannins of something else..
 
This thread made me curious about raisin wine, so I gave it a try...

it was very easy to make (raisins from Costco, pour boiling water over top and soak overnight to re-hydrate, puree in sanitized blender with sugar, pour into sanitized fermenter and add Lavin EC118, rack into new fermentor thru sanitized filter bag, top up with Knudsons "just cherry juice"). I did sprinkle in some pectic enzyme, just to see if it made much of a difference (yes it is hazy)

Since this is my first attempt, the mechanics were a little rough around the edges.

and it is still in the secondary and is still very sweet, but basically ....this is really good! :yes::ban:

not too astringent, and I will have to wait a while to see if it is too sweet or needs tannin or acid blend

Is anybody else out there making this now? or regularly?
 
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