Best White grape concentrate

[ElezEspana]

Hello everyone.

I am new to wine making. Only worked with a few cheap kits so far, but I have noticed that the kits are essentially Concentrate, Yeast, Yeast Nutrient, and Finings.

So I was thinking that the next step I should take is to try and create a wine by collecting together my own kit.

There are loads of websites where I can get everything from, apart from Grape Concentrate. This (In the UK), seems to be hard to find.

I am looking to make something similar to a Sauvignon Blanc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[ElezEspana]

Hello everyone.

I am new to wine making. Only worked with a few cheap kits so far, but I have noticed that the kits are essentially Concentrate, Yeast, Stabiliser, Yeast Nutrient, and Finings.

So I was thinking that the next step I should take is to try and create wine by collecting together the ingredients individually.

There are loads of websites where I can get everything from, apart from Grape Concentrate. This (In the UK), seems to be hard to find.

I am looking to make something similar to a Sauvignon Blanc and have a load of Demijohns ready so I can do a load of 1-gallon experiments.

Any advice on the right concentrate, yeast etc would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi ElezEspana, and welcome to the forum. Your list of key elements of a wine "kit" is precisely what anyone needs to make a wine from grapes, or from fruit, vegetables, flowers or honey. The couple of ingredients that are usually included in the concentrate are acids to give you a wine with a TA of around 6 to 6.5 g/L (TA being the amount of acid in a solution and not the strength of the acid, that being the pH). The other ingredient you don't mention is oak (for tannins, and mouthfeel) and if you are making country wines (wines from fermentables other than grapes) you might want to use pectic enzymes a) to produce more juice from the fruit and b) to break down proteins that can result in a cloudy , hazy finish rather than a clear finish.

I say all this because even if finding a good inexpensive source of grape juice or concentrate is difficult, you can make incredibly good wines from any fruit you enjoy, any vegetable (even those you may not imagine could make a good wine), any edible flower, and of course honey is the main source of flavor and sugar for mead. Grapes are but ONE possible source of wine. And if you live in Britain you have access to cowslips, heather, elderflowers, elderberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, blackberries, apples, pears, courgettes, raspberries, strawberries. The best wines are wines made from native fruits and the best native fruits are often the fruits you can forage.