Concord Grape Wine Recipe: From Backyard Grapes

The short answer: to make Concord grape wine from fresh grapes, crush 6 pounds of Concord grapes in a nylon bag, add 5 pints of water, 3¼ cups of sugar, pectic enzyme, yeast nutrient, a crushed Campden tablet and a wine yeast, and ferment on the pulp for 5 to 6 days. Then press the bag, move the wine to a jug under an airlock and rack it every couple of months until it clears. For a fuller, sweeter wine, use 12 pounds of grapes and only 2 pints of water. Both versions come from Jack Keller’s Requested Recipes Collection (2020), adapted by Keller from Raymond Massaccesi’s Winemaker’s Recipe Handbook.

This page is for people with a vine or a box of fresh Concords. If all you have is a bottle of Welch’s, use our guide to making wine from grape juice instead. New to winemaking? Read the full guide to making wine at home first; this page assumes you know what racking and an airlock are.

Concord Grape Wine at a Glance

The timeline is long. Keller’s instructions run to a first check at 30 days, racking after 2 months and again after 2 more, and then two years in the bottle. A Concord wine started this fall is a wine for the fall after next.

Why Concord Grapes Need Sugar, Water and Pectic Enzyme

Keller describes the Concord as the most popularly planted native American grape, a variety of Vitis labrusca. It resists many of the diseases that destroy European Vitis vinifera, and the same toughness makes it a fine backyard vine. The trade-off is in the juice.

Not enough sugar, plenty of acid and pectin

According to Keller, Concords, even their hybrids, rarely have the high natural sugar of pure vinifera grapes, and they carry more pectin and acid. That is why his recipes add sugar, add water to balance the acid and add pectic enzyme so the wine clears. Skip the enzyme and you risk a haze that does not settle.

A musky aroma

Keller also notes that Concord wines can have a musky aroma that some people dislike. If you want to tone it down, he lists whole aromatics that work: cinnamon bark, cloves, coriander, whole nutmeg, vanilla bean and several others. His rule is one tablespoon per gallon of most of them, tied in a fine mesh bag and left in the must during the primary fermentation only, then squeezed gently and discarded. He says not to use ground spices. This is optional; the two recipes below do not need it.

Want to compare with another native American grape? Our muscadine wine recipe deals with the opposite problem, even higher acid.

Why the Starting Gravity Matters

Keller’s rule for grape wine is that the starting specific gravity must be at least 1.095, which gives an alcohol content of 12.7%. He adds that 12% is needed to preserve the wine, and that you lose some liquid in racking, so it is wiser to start a little higher than the minimum. This is the one number in the recipe you should measure rather than trust. A hydrometer reading tells you whether to add sugar; the cups on the card are a starting point. Our sugar calculator does the arithmetic for your batch size.

The Fuller-Bodied Version: 12 Pounds of Grapes

The second Keller recipe changes the balance. It uses twice the grapes and far less water, which Keller says makes a full-bodied, sweet dessert wine. The procedure is the same, with these differences.

• Grapes: 12 pounds of fresh Concords, divided between two nylon bags.
• Water and sugar: 2 pints of water with 1½ cups of sugar already dissolved in it.
• Pectic enzyme: 1 teaspoon.
• Nutrient and Campden: 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient and 1 crushed Campden tablet, as before.
• Sweetening at the end: 1¼ cups of sugar syrup per gallon, after stabilizing.

Everything else follows the dry recipe: 12 hours, then pectic enzyme, then 12 more hours, gravity check against 1.095, yeast, daily stirring and squeezing, a press at 1.030, then the same rackings and the same two years of waiting. Twelve pounds of grapes is a lot of crushing and squeezing; a grape crusher and a wine press make it much easier.

A second wine from the pulp

Keller’s third Concord recipe uses the pressed pulp from the first batch (6 to 10 pounds of grapes) with a gallon minus a cup of water, 8 to 10 ounces of red grape concentrate or Concord juice, 2 pounds of sugar, acid, tannin and nutrient. It relies on the yeast still in the pulp, so he says to start it as soon as the first wine is pressed and not to let the pulp dry out. Keller says the second wines he has made turned out extremely well.

How Many Concord Grapes Per Gallon

You will see two very different answers, and both are right for what they describe. Keller’s recipes use 6 pounds of Concords per gallon in the dry version and 12 in the fuller one, because he adds water and sugar to stretch and balance the juice. Cornell’s enology extension gives a different figure: about 150 gallons of wine per ton of grapes, which works out to roughly 13 pounds of grapes per gallon (Grapes 101: Conversion Factors, Chris Gerling, 2011). That is the planning number for wine made only from pressed grapes, with no water added.

So 13 pounds per gallon is what you need if you want a wine with nothing but grape in it. Keller’s 6 pounds is what you need if you are willing to dilute. The calculator below gives either, for any batch size.

Sweetening and Stabilizing Concord Wine

Keller says both Concord wines should be stabilized before the final sweetening and bottling, either with a commercial stabilizer or with one crushed Campden tablet and ½ teaspoon of potassium sorbate per gallon. Do this only once the wine is fully clear and fermentation has finished, or the sugar will restart it in the bottle.

Making the syrup

Keller’s final sweetening is always two parts sugar dissolved in one part boiling water, cooled. The syrup must be clear, so stir until every granule has dissolved. For the dry recipe add ½ to ¾ cup of syrup per gallon, tasting as you go; for the fuller recipe Keller gives 1¼ cups. Add a little, taste, and stop when it suits you, since syrup cannot be taken back out.

More on sweetening

Our guide to how to backsweeten wine covers stabilizing, dosing and testing in more detail. Picking the grapes at the right time makes a difference to how much sugar you need to add; see when to harvest grapes for wine. Rack with care between stages, as shown in our guide to how to rack wine. Make and drink wine responsibly, and only if you are of legal drinking age.