Making Wine from Concentrate

[arh13p]

I made apple wine and grape wine from frozen concentrate. I have want to make more but had a couple questions:

First - For either the apple or grape, can I just use the frozen concentrate to backsweeten/flavor before bottling? I don't really want to sweeten too much since I like these two dry how they are. They are almost 4 mo. old right now bulk aging. How many cans per gallons should I use?

Secondly - I want to try Cranberry/Apple. I am looking at the frozen concentrate from Old Orchard. The ingredients are: Apple Juice Concentrate, Filtered Water (Only Sufficient To Reconstitute Juice Concentrates), Pear Juice Concentrate, Cranberry Juice Concentrate, Aronia Juice Concentrate, Natural Flavors, Citric Acid, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C).

Is this OK. I was more concerned with the "natural flavors" but then again I did a 4 gallon batch of cran-raspberry that had this and it turned out fine. What are your thoughts? Thanks.

 

[roadwarriorsvt]

3-4 cans of concentrate per gallon is fine. Just measure your SG. That will assist you in how much concentrate you add. Adding can concentrate for backsweetening is also fine. Check out the recipe section. There are some recipes for various concentrate wines there.

 

[winemakingscientist]

The "natural flavors" in the cranberry juice blend shouldn't hurt anything. If you look around here, you'll find people are making wine out of skittles and other kinds of candy, so it's not like food flavoring is going to cause major problems.