How to turn Grape Juice into Wine

In my freshly sanitized kitchen, I started to follow the recipe by dissolving sugar in water and adding the thawed concentrate, then fortifying it with the yeast nutrient and a dash of pectic enzyme.

This recipe is to winemaking as the Easy-Bake Oven is to making elegant French pastries. It does away with the vintage reports and soil composition and condenses the magic of brewing a drink beloved by humanity for millenia into a process that’s only a little harder than making a dump cake. With little more than a couple cans of purple stuff stirred into some sugar plus a little chemical magic, you too can harness the creative power of a winemaker. The wine I was making was closer to tightly controlled, cheap industrial bottles than anything I’m used to drinking, but that doesn’t mean making it wasn’t exciting.

For the first 24 hours I marveled as the potion blew large mucus-y bubbles and vigorous foam into the headspace of the jug placed in the middle of my dining table like a centerpiece. By the following week, the fermentation was tamer, retreating to a compact purple crema that eventually dissipated while the layer of sediment at the bottom of the jug grew thicker.

On it went, fizzing undisturbed for over a month. After the bubbles died down completely, I let it sit a few more weeks, waiting for the dead yeast cells to fall out of suspension so that the wine would be clear before siphoning it into a new, sanitized, jug.

At that point, I could have pursued the traditional route of storing the wine in sealed 750-milliliter glass bottles and letting it age for a year to mellow the final product, but as the impulsive winemaker that I am, I decided to serve it right away.

Pretty fun if it's too cold to go to the package store.