The White Grape Juice shortage thread .

[Gorty]

Sainsburys are doing their RGJ (from concentrate) 2 for £1.50, they sent me some vouchers, £4 off when you spend £20, so 28 cartons = £21 minus the £4 voucher = £17, just over 60p each! The best bit, I have a voucher for each of the next 3 weeks as well!
This RGJ is very red it makes a deep rose with a white juice like apple or a deep red with something like blueberry.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Thanks.

....

 

[HarrowBrewer]

Has anyone tried using Kedem white grape juice? It's on offer in my local Sainsburys for £1.50 for 650ml. It says "no sugar colouring or flavouring added", just has natural grape juice and sulphites as ingredients. 17g of sugar per 100ml. Should I boil it up or do you reckon it's good to go?

 

[Chippy_Tea]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]

As you can see below i[/FONT]t has Potassium Metabisulfite as part of its ingredients, i have boiled Ribena to get rid of preservative with not much success (it took several weeks to ferment) so i guess its worth a try, let us know how you get on.

Description

KEDEM WHITE GRAPE JUICE 64 OZ
KEDEM 100% WHITE GRAPE JUICE CONTAINS ONLY THE BEST NATURE HAS TO OFFER.
KEDEM GRAPE JUICE IS ALWAYS 100% PURE JUICE, WITH NO SUGAR, ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS OR COLORS ADDED.
ENJOY THE PURE, HEALTHY GOODNESS OF KEDEM GRAPE JUICE.
PRODUCT OF THE U.S.A.
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]INGREDIENTS: WHITE GRAPE JUICE, (MAY BE SWEETENED WITH GRAPE JUICE CONCENTRATE), POTASSIUM METABISULFITE ADDED TO ENHANCE FRESHNESS.[/FONT]

 

[tonyhibbett]

Definitely worth a try. Yeast can tolerate a small amount of sulphite. When grapes are pressed, sulphite is added to kill off bacteria, but the juice soon starts fermenting naturally.

 

[tonyhibbett]

My recent search in Tesco found no white grape juice at all, but red juice was available in the chiller for £1.50 per litre. Wilco had some concentrate at £3.00 per 220g but no Young's Definitive, which is a slightly better deal. Minced 'value' sultanas are still the best option. I recently found an inexpensive 'low grape' recipe, which I have modified:
150 g sultanas
2 litres apple juice
1 jar of 'value' honey
A handful of dried elderflowers
5 g tartaric acid
5 g tannin
1 teaspoon pectolase
10 g oak chips
Yeast and nutrient
Sugar (about 500g) and water to 5 litres and sg 1090

Mince the sultanas in a food mixer with some of the sugar (makes it less sticky). Add to bucket with honey and elderflowers and pour on some boiling water. to release flavours and dissolve sugar. When cool, add remaining ingredients, except oak chips. Strain after 3 days. Once pulp has settled, rack into fv and add oak chips. Continue fermentation at 15 c. Rack again at sg 1005, rinsing the chips and putting them back in. Once fermentation is complete, allow the wine to sit on the sediment and clear naturally in a cool place. Once clear, rack again and leave with the rinsed chips for a month, then bottle and leave for 3 months or more.
The bouquet will be much improved with fresh, rather than dried elderflowers, while the flavour would be further enhanced with a higher proportion of honey.
Although this is basically an enhanced apple wine, I recently tasted an excellent £8 bottle of French Touraine sauvignon blanc, which tasted of honeyed granny smith apple with a floral bouquet. It was very dry, with a ph of 3.1. It went down a treat with wild salmon, oven baked with lime slices and parsley.

 

[tonyhibbett]

Tesco 'value' sultanas at 84p per 500 g are the equivalent of 2 litres of white grape juice. OK, not so convenient as juice as you need to chop them and deal with the sediment, but nonetheless very cheap and readily available.

 

[HarrowBrewer]

An update to the Kedem white grape juice - I made two WOWs with Kedem white grape juice and Copella apple and pear juice (it was on offer…) I boiled up the kedem juice for one DJ and used the other one as it came. Usual additives of pectolase and strong tea, and they have both come out tasting pretty much identical, and not bad at all. The only difference was that the boiled grape juice DJ developed a massive crust on the top which never sank, but I racked it off/under with no ill effects.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Thanks for the feedback. :thumb:

 

[helluvatractor]

i have made 8 x 1 gallon batches of various fruit tes bag wines using sultanas. i substituted 250g of part blended sultanas to each litre of grape juice needed, (in the tea bag case, i used 500g of sultanas per gallon.

its a mess when you first start, all the sultana pulp floats to the top, after 5 days i poured the lot through muslin, topped up with water and back in DJ to ferment out. after that, the fine sediment sinks to the bottom , as normal.

first impressions - very nice. a little more work, but a lot cheaper than wgj !!!

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Thanks for the heads up, Tonyhibbett is in the middle of making wine with them, i will post a link if i can find it.

Edit to add -

Its here - http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=52475

 

[tonyhibbett]

You end up with about an inch of fine pulp sediment which is initially easily disturbed and should be left a few days before racking. It took a few days for fining to clear it. It's a basic white, using 1.25 kilos of minced sultanas, a little sugar, tannin and tartaric acid and fermented with oak chips. I got a much better result using less sultana and combining with peach nectar and apple juice. Tesco Everyday Value sultanas are cheaper than their raisins and have a higher sugar content (73%). The trick is to coarsely mince them. In fact I have just bought a cheap (£20) electric mincer to process large quantities. A food processor does an uneven job.

 

[psychodave]

Bit of an old thread now, but I just wanted to add that I've been searching for white grape juice for a while. It can't be just demand in the area, if so many people are having the same issue.
I've been looking all round the Warrington and Widnes area, my parents have been looking in North Wales and anywhere they go, but still no juice. I'm thinking of getting some cheap grapes but that will still cost a fortune.
Maybe a red elderflower wine may be on the cards, as long as I can find red grape juice ^^

 

[Chippy_Tea]

I gave up on white grape juice because of the difficulty in finding it, i switched to red grape juice which for me makes better tasting wines than WGJ ever did, (it does not make red wine or taste like red wine) there is loads of it about, the best i have found is this -


.

 

[Marcarm]

Have you got the recipe for the RGJ please?

What does the end result taste like? Anything to compare it to?

 

[Chippy_Tea]

I make a lot of this and it goes down well, if you want to just use RGJ switch the apple for a bottle of RGJ and use the same amounts of everything else.

If you want to see how it is made have a look here - http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=49462


Easy Rosé wine

1 litre Red grape juice (ASDA)

1 litre Apple Juice (ASDA)

800g Sugar.

1 tsp Tannin or a mug of very strong black tea. (3 bags stirred every couple of minutes as you put the rest of the ingredients together)

1 tsp Yeast (i use youngs super wine yeast compound)

1 tsp Yeast Nutrient.

1 tsp Pectolase.

1 tsp Glycerine.

1 tsp citric acid or juice of one lemon. (optional)

 

[Marcarm]

Thanks, I've got some Youngs dried active yeast, that'll do the job?

Notice sainsburys are doing 1l cartons of RGL 2 for £1.50 so was thinking of making some wine with them.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

If they are 100% juice and don't have preservative go for it.

 

[Marcarm]

No mention of preservatives on the pack.

No idea what it will turn out like but half the fun is experimenting.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

You are right and i have done that a lot and other than the original WGJ and orange juice WOW i haven't made one we don't like.