“Can one make drinkable wine from Aldi grape juice? 🤔 We’ll find out!”
All of the recipes I've found for this sort of thing call for adding an insane amount of sugar - on the order of a cup of sugar for every quart of juice. That would mean adding 3½ cups of sugar to this recipe! There is no way the yeast can consume that amount of sugar, so the result would be a very sweet wine like Manischewitz concord wine. While I can appreciate a bit of sweet wine at the end of a tasting, I don't really drink it at home. So, my goal is to produce a dry concord wine. Having not seen a recipe or having ever tasted one, I am going into this not knowing what to expect. If there is not enough sugar in the juice to kick off fermentation (highly unlikely) or the resulting (hopefully dry) wine is unpleasant, I can always back-sweeten it.
I measured the specific gravity of the juice. This is a measure of the amount of sugar in a solution. Home brewers' hydrometers are not super accurately calibrated, but the actual measurement is not as important as the difference between the measurements before and after fermentation. This will allow me to calculate the percent alcohol by volume. Specific gravity is also an indication of dryness. Specific gravity is measured as a percent solutes relative to the specific gravity of water, which is assigned the value of 1. I measured a starting specific gravity of 1.066:
To calculate the percent alcohol by volume (ABV) you subtract your final reading from your initial reading, then multiply the result by 131.25.
After capping the bottle and shaking thoroughly for about 3 minutes to oxygenate the grape juice (for the yeast's initial growth phase) and distribute the yeast granules throughout the solution so that they can hydrate efficiently:
In place next to my mead fermenter after adding the remaining juice, ready to be left undisturbed so the yeastie beasties can do their thing:
Close-up showing my improvised airlock. You really don't need to buy an airlock if you have a stopper and some flexible tubing. They're just more convenient. The cork in the fermenting vessel has a hole in it the size of the tubing providing an air-tight seal. The cork in the flask is just wedged in there to keep the tubing from popping out from under the surface of the water. The carbon dioxide produced by the yeast can easily escape in the gap so that no pressure builds up and no messy explosions happen.
7 hours after pitching the yeast (original bubbles from shaking are gone - these are yeast generated CO2 bubbles):
Fermentation - Day 3:
¹Having made both wine and beer several times over the years, I have a 5 gallon fermenting bucket and a 5 gallon glass carboy, however when I decided to try making my first mead I wanted a 1 gallon primary fermentation vessel. I wandered around the liquor store until I found wine in the right size bottle. Carlo Rossi. They had several varieties, but I chose Cabernet Sauvignon as it is my "go to" wine and I've never had a bad cab sauv. I jokingly labeled the bottle I decanted it into (so as to not need to keep the jug out on the counter taking up space) "Cheap Cab Sauv™" but it turned out that the decanted wine was actually pretty decent. This batch of homemade wine with Aldi grocery store juice is even cheaper, though likely nowhere near as good. But I'm retired, so spending some time experimenting for fun is harmless.