Can I make wine with these ingredients?

hey guys,
I've never made wine before. I do live in a dry country.

with the help of a friend, I was able to get my hands on some wine yeast (Lalvin 71B-1122 Narbonne Wine Yeast 5G).

At home, I have a fermenter, sanitzer, airlock, natural grape juice and sugar.

that's all i have. Can I still make wine with whatever I have? Please let me know. what volume of grape+sugar should I use?

thanks.

Hi Omazing. You can make wine from any fruit. Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) -is the same organism that you use to bake bread (although wine yeasts have been cultured to produce more alcohol and tolerate conditions that the yeast grown for bread making cannot). I will use imperial measures because I am most familiar with these: Most fruit contains the equivalent of about 1 - 1.25 lbs of sugar in every gallon of juice you can extract from the fruit. That means that the fruit will have a specific gravity of about 1.040 - 1.050. That's enough to make the equivalent amount of alcohol that is found in a beer or cider. To make a wine you want to start with a specific gravity of about 1.090 and that means you will want to add another pound of sugar (less than 0.5 K) to each gallon of juice. Now wine grapes are likely to have this amount of sugar naturally, but I suspect that grape juice will be similar to any other juice. What I am saying is that wine can be made from any fruit - from figs to dates from apples to pineapples, from oranges to pomegranates and if you add about 1 pound of sugar to each gallon of juice you will have enough sugar for a wine.
Now, if you have listed all the material you have then you do not have an hydrometer and an hydrometer is a really useful tool to tell you how much sugar is in the juice and how far along your wine is in converting all the sugar into alcohol. If you cannot get hold of one, then you can't... but if you can it will really help you make your wine more effectively because yeast does not use a calendar and really, the only way to know what is going on is to take measurements using this tool.
What you need to be careful about is if you are buying juice that the juice has no preservatives added to prevent the juice from spoiling because one form of spoilage that is prevented is the juice fermenting... In other words, if your grape juice contains sorbates then it will not ferment. Good luck.

thank you. this is very helpful. unfortunately i don't have a hydrometer so i'm going to guess here. going by what you listed, it seems like i need 5 gallons of juice and about 2.5K of sugar. for how long should i keep them in the fermenter? would 4 weeks be fine?

Yeast don't use calendars.. and how well they ferment depends on a host of criteria - the temperature, the total amount of sugar you are asking them to chow through, the acidity of the juice, how well you aerate the juice, how well you remove the CO2 as the fermentation continues.. I have some wines that are ready in a week or two and others that can take three or four months.
If you have to, you can ferment 20 L (5 gallons) at a time... I prefer to make my wines in 1 - 3 gallon batches. Five gallons is - what ? 25 bottles? Two cases? That's a lot of wine if you find that the batch is not quite as good as you imagined it would be... and if the one gallon of wine surpasses all your expectations and you have kept careful notes then you can be making a second batch the same day you cracked open the first bottle...
The challenge of not having an hydrometer is that if you bottle a wine while there is still unfermented sugar left in the juice and you trap the CO2 that the yeast produce you may find that glass bottles burst, corks and caps fly off and the wine might explode out the bottle. Soda bottles with screw caps might simply swell like balloons but the contents may still gush out when you try to pour the wine...
Now, hydrometers are used for all kinds of purposes - including to check to see if you have enough anti-freeze in a car radiator.. or what the salinity of water is... so even if you live in a "dry" part of the world it may still be possible to find an hydrometer (or even make one). This is simply a tube with a weight on one end that floats at different depths in different densities of liquid. What you want to know is how close is your juice to the density of water (1.000). Since alcohol is less dense than water then this tube should float a little lower in wine than it would if it was floating in water (.996, say) . and float much higher if your juice had about 2 lbs of sugar dissolved in it (about 1.080)

There are a ton of wine recipes on this site that can give you an idea of proportions. Check here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=79

Here's a simple fermented grape juice + sugar recipe (leave out the things you don't have):
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=21093

There are also calculators on the web that can tell you how much potential alcohol different amounts of sugar, honey, molasses, or other sweeteners contribute. This one was made for beer, but I use it for wine just because of all the other ingredients it allows you to choose. Just choose your batch size, then put various amounts of fermentables in to see what your final ABV comes out to.

Wine ain't beer. A calculator for wine making seems like overkill. One pound of sugar dissolved in water to make 1 gallon (US) will raise the gravity by 40 points. All 40 points are fermentable so potentially that will add about 5 (or 5.25)% ABV. Honey at the same weight (1 lb) will increase the gravity by 35 points (all points are fermentable) so that will increase the ABV by 4.5%. My rule of thumb is to multiply the gravity by 131 to con vert gravity to ABV.
My second rule of thumb is that most fruit made for eating will have about 1.25 lbs of sugar in a gallon of the juice. You can increase the gravity by increasing the concentration. But you do that by freezing NOT by boiling. Wine making ain't brewing! You freeze the juice and you allow the frozen juice to slowly thaw. If you capture the first 1/3 of the thawed juice you will have doubled the amount of sugar (and flavor)... So you can assume that 3 gallons of say, papaya juice reduced to 1 gallon will contain about 2.5 lbs of sugar (or have a specific gravity of about (2.5* 40 = 1.100) and a potential ABV of about 13%.