5 gals of grape juice = 5 gallons of wine.
the hardest part about making wine is pressing the grapes into juice. No stepping on them is not a good idea. they make cider presses for apples which can also be used for grapes, but alot depends on the gaps between the slats as grapes are much smaller than apples. there are some plans for grape presses on the interwebs if you are inclined to make your own press.
Once the grapes are converted to juice its a matter of putting it into a sterile clean fermentor, adding wine yeast, and fermenting. Pretty simple really. Here in St. Pete/largo is a Homebrew shop called the Beer and Wine makers pantry. They sell everything you need to brew your own wine, beer, or mead. And under federal law you are allowed to make 100 gallons of beer/wine per year providing you are over the age of 21. 200 gallons max if two members of the household are over 21.
The shop keepers are very knowledgeable about making beer and wine, and they have been very helpful all these years. If you are not local to St. Pete then I suggest googling for a local homebrew shop near you. Its always better to go in person rather than order stuff online, unless you are knowledgable about what you are buying.
I am willing to help and have all the equipment minus the press. I have always made my wine from juice.
feel free to ask me any questions you may have.
BTW muscadine grapes are very sweet and will produce a very sweet grappy tasting wine. Not bad mind you just sweet and tastes much like grape juice.
G.W., were you Friar Tuck in a former life?
No, but I sometimes wish I were. I do look a lot like him now, more round the belly area than anywhere else. 🙂
My favorite brews that I make, and are my specialties are an Amber Ale, a German Lager(oktoberfest or marzen), fruit wines, and plain Sweet Mead.
Mead btw is wine made from pure honey! This was the very first alcoholic beverage ever made by nature. Yes I said nature. Imagine if you will, a bee hive in a tree. The tree gets struck by lightning or broken by wind storm. the honey is exposed to the elements. It rains and the honey is dliuted into a thin sugary water. Some wild yeast floats by, and lands in this sugary mixture, a week or two later and wala, mother nature just made alcohol! Man figured out what mother nature did, and began to copy her, and thus homebrewing was born. In the years that past man found he could make other alcoholic beverages by using the sugars extracted from malted grains. and thus beer was born.
History shows that evidence of alcoholic beverages have been found as early as egyption times and even earlier. the modern day beer which uses Hops as a bittering and preseving agent only begain to show up around the 16th century. And YES beer, wine & spirits have been taxed long before our government came to power!
My doghunting buddy's uncle makes muscadine wine that tastes sweet but is strong. I found that out the hard way one night lol. He always sends us a few gallons of it during the season because I have a sugarcane patch and give most of it to him. I want to say he uses the sugarcane cooking vat/pot somehow to press his grapes?
In southern Africa there is a fruit tree called a marula. The fruit is about the size and shape of a kiwi, but inside it has a large center stone like a peach or plum, and flesh kind of like a lychee. The skin is thick and not eaten. Very good when ripe, and the short few weeks when they are in season the natives make "marula beer", and they spend a lot of time making as much as they can while the fruit is available. When we lived over there we had a maid who took a week off when it was time to make the beer! One comical effect was thatthe fruit would fall on the ground and ferment, and the animals would eat them to excess and get drunk off their :ahole !
We used to have some home movies of this, but they got lost in one of our moves. There are some good videos on youtube of it, like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5E5TjkDvU0&p=F4D624583C14E9E4&playnext=1&index=5
