Interesting idea. Seems like it would make a very boring wine though. I imagine it would be better to juice high quality grapes yourself rather than buying bottles of grape juice. Might be worth infusing it some other ingredients as well. I don't know if you'd want them in the instant pot though

[–] shutz@lemmy.ca 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The grapes used to make the juice you buy at the store are not the same grapes that are used to make actual wine. The person who wrote that recipe doesn't know what wine should taste like, and I wouldn't trust that recipe.

The grape juice you buy for drinking is mainly made from Concord grapes, which won't make something that tastes in any way like real wine. You need grapes like Cabernet or Pinot Noir (for example). These aren't just the names of wines, they're the names of the varieties of grapes used.

[–] babboa@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

I mean, you CAN make wine out of Concord grapes, but it still tastes like Concord grapes after fermentation. Many places that lack the more temperate climate of France or coastal California make a lot of wine out of Concord and similar grape varieties bred from native grape species that are in many cases more disease resistant and tolerant of extreme temps. Overall, they tend to be sweeter wines(though concords technically have a lower natural sugar content on average than many traditional varieties) and often they get mixed with other fruit wines (blackberry, blueberry, strawberry, and even another native grape called a muscadine) because they aren't easy to extract a lot of tannins out of, and are a real one trick pony from a flavor perspective. Many attempts have been made to breed grapes that exhibit more "traditional" wine flavors, to varying degrees of success.

That being said, this is some real prison hooch territory and there's zero reason to do something like this with as accessable as winemaking kits are these days. Now if you're in a prohibition type scenario maybe it makes at least some sort of sense.