How do you know?

[RighteousDrinker]

How do you calculate a recipe for making at home?
Example:How would you know how much juice needed for making wine in a 1 gallon carboy/jug?
Sorry, i'm new to this wine making process.
How exactly do you know how much of what you need to make 1 gallon or 5 gallons of wine?

 

[WVMountaineerJack]

Use 100% juice, use a hydrometer to tell you how much sugar is in it and so how much to add and an acid titration kit to tell you if you need to adjust the acidity are the basic tools you need to get started. WVMJ

 

[olusteebus]

As a start, go to the recipes of this forum. That will give you a feel for the recipes.

 

[BernardSmith]

If you are just getting started I am not certain that you need the finesse of acid titration kits. Your taste can tell you if you need to adjust the "recipe" to make it more or less acidic (to give it more "bite") but you need 1 gallon to make a gallon and 5 gallons to make five. In fact you may need slightly more than those volumes as you will lose some liquid to sediment (lees). For example, if you are making mango or apricot wine, you might ferment a gallon but when you rack (siphon) the wine from the primary fermenting bucket into a carboy you might find that about 1/3 of the original volume is composed of sediment.

And as WVMJack suggests an hydrometer to wine making is like a stethoscope to doctoring. It is pretty much essential. Your experience may differ but I tend to find that the fruit I use to make wine typically has enough sugar in it to make a wine of about 4 or 5 % alcohol. That will have very little shelf life and may be subject to all kinds of problems so I generally aim to make my wines at about 11 or 12 % ABV . That means I need to add additional sugars but the only way to know how much sugar I need to add is to know how much sugar is in the fruit and the least expensive way to measure that is to measure the specific gravity (the density) of the must (the juice prior to the addition of the yeast) and the tool for taking such measurements is an hydrometer.

 

[JohnT]

You mention needing a recipe, but I do not know if you are making wine starting with juice or whole grapes....

If starting with fruit..

I need 3.24 pounds of grapes per liter of storage space.
That works out to about 12.3 lbs per gallon or 62 pounds for a 5 gallon carboy.

I then let the grapes tell me what I need. I test the acid and adjust as needed, I let them sit on the skins for as long as I need to obtain the right color and tannins, I add 4oz of oak for every 5 gallons of wine, etc.