{"id":187,"date":"2008-04-15T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T13:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/15\/tax-day-wine\/"},"modified":"2008-04-15T06:00:49","modified_gmt":"2008-04-15T13:00:49","slug":"tax-day-wine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/15\/tax-day-wine\/","title":{"rendered":"Tax Day Wine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Wine from Welch&#8217;s grape juice<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Its tax day in the US, and this year taxes made me busier and grumpier than normal. With all that behind me, I&#8217;m starting to feel like my old self. So when Welch&#8217;s concentrated grape juice went on sale the other day, I bought twelve cans to make a &#8220;Tax Day Wine.&#8221; Yep, definitely feeling better! If you&#8217;ve never made wine from frozen concentrate, it probably seems like a nutty idea. There is method in this madness, however, and good technique can transform Welch&#8217;s grape juice into a drinkable wine that costs less than $1\/bottle. Think of it as the home wine maker&#8217;s version of &#8220;Two Buck Chuck,&#8221; the simple, popular table wine that Trader Joe&#8217;s sells for $2\/bottle in most of the country (and a higher but still affordable $3\/bottle here in Washington).<\/p>\n<p><strong>What kind of juice<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There are all sorts of frozen concentrates available, and I&#8217;ve made wine from a lot of them. The white grape juice, made from Niagra grapes, is the most consistent, and that&#8217;s what I&#8217;ll be using. Others have been hit or miss, with some of the hits being really good and some of the misses being really disappointing. I suggest you start with white grape (other brands, like Old Orchard, are fine). After you make that, you&#8217;ll have a better idea of what to expect from concentrates. If you want to make more, then by all means try the blends like Dole&#8217;s Pine-Orange-Banana &#8211; just watch your acid, don&#8217;t expect the wine to taste like the juice, and have fun.<\/p>\n<p>I hope to make this in the next week or so, and then I&#8217;ll do a proper writeup. Until then, Happy Tax Day!<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Update 1\/29\/09: Better late than never! Full writeup on Welch&#8217;s wine<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Boy did I ever get sidetracked! It was nine months in coming, but I finally posted a complete recipe for wine from frozen concentrate. If you&#8217;ve made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/19\/bailout-blanc-white-wine-for-hard-times\/\">Welch&#8217;s wine<\/a>, let me know how it turned out. If not, maybe now&#8217;s the time to give it a try. While you&#8217;re at it, you might have a look at my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/27\/produce-department-chablis\/\">Produce Department Chablis<\/a>, a wine made from grocery store grapes.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wine from Welch&#8217;s grape juice Its tax day in the US, and this year taxes made me busier and grumpier than normal. With all that behind me, I&#8217;m starting to feel like my old self. So when Welch&#8217;s concentrated grape juice went on sale the other day, I bought twelve cans to make a &#8220;Tax [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-winemaking"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}