Grapefruit Wine Recipe: Dry or Sweet, From Fresh Grapefruit

The short answer: yes, you can make wine from grapefruit, and it works as a dry table wine or a sweeter sipping wine. A 1 gallon dry batch uses the juice of 6 large grapefruit, 2 pounds of sugar, pectic enzyme, a Campden tablet and a wine yeast, plus the thin peel of one grapefruit. Ferment it for four days in the primary, then rack every 30 days. The wine needs at least 6 months in the bottle before it stops tasting harsh.

The recipes on this page come from Jack Keller’s Requested Recipes Collection (compiled 2020), which Keller wrote for a reader with two grapefruit trees and more fruit than she could give away. We give his dry recipe in full and summarize his two sweeter versions. New to winemaking? Start with our full guide to making wine at home. If you have a lemon tree as well, see our lemon wine recipe.

Grapefruit Wine at a Glance

Count roughly five months from the first day to the bottle, then wait. Keller’s timeline means a batch started today is not ready to drink this winter.

Sweeter Grapefruit Wine

Keller gives four grapefruit recipes, arranged from dry to sweet. The dry recipe above is his first. These are the others, as differences from it. Each makes one gallon from 6 large grapefruit.

The other dry version

• Uses 6 large pink grapefruit, 1¾ lb of sugar, 3¾ quarts of water and one 12-ounce can of frozen white grape juice concentrate.
• Adds ¼ tsp grape tannin and uses Champagne yeast.
• The grated zest of 2 or 3 grapefruit and the peeled, sectioned fruit go into a nylon bag in the primary. After 5 to 7 days the bag is lifted out and allowed to drip drain, without squeezing.

Semi-sweet

• Uses 1¾ lb of sugar, 1 lb of chopped golden raisins, ⅛ tsp tannin and Sauterne yeast.
• After the fifth racking, Keller stabilizes the wine, waits ten days, racks off the sediment, then adds ¼ cup of sugar dissolved in ⅛ cup of boiling water (cooled) and bottles.

Dessert wine

• Uses 2 lb of sugar, ⅛ tsp tannin and Sauterne yeast, and adds 1 tablespoon of U.S.P. glycerin at bottling.
• After the fifth racking, he stabilizes, waits ten days, racks, then adds ½ cup of sugar dissolved in ¼ cup of boiling water (cooled) along with the glycerin before bottling.

Both sweeter versions are Keller’s own recipes. The sweetening step is the same idea we cover in how to backsweeten wine: stabilize first so the added sugar does not restart fermentation. If you want a lower alcohol, lemony-sweet drink instead of a full wine, see Skeeter Pee.

Aging: Why Grapefruit Wine Needs 6 Months

Keller is firm on this point. He says grapefruit wine requires at least six months of bottle aging to remove the harshness of youth and let it mellow. Longer aging improves it, up to about a year or two. After that, he says, the wine peaks and slowly declines.

What that means for your calendar

Do not judge the wine at the first racking or the day you bottle it. A young grapefruit wine tastes sharp, and the sharpness is the thing time fixes. Taste one bottle at six months, then leave the rest.

Drink it within a couple of years

Unlike a red you might hold for a decade, Keller’s advice puts the peak at roughly one to two years. Our guide to how long homemade wine lasts covers storage, and how to bottle and cork wine covers getting it into the bottle cleanly.

Peel, Zest and Pith

Every Keller recipe above treats the white pith as something to keep out. In his dry recipe the instruction is to peel one grapefruit thinly, “making sure no white pith adheres to peel.” In the semi-sweet recipe, the pulp is scraped from the fruit “being careful not to allow any pith to adhere to pulp.”

How much peel

It varies by recipe. Keller uses the thin peel of one grapefruit in the dry and dessert versions, two in the semi-sweet, and the grated zest of two or three in the second dry version. The peel is where the grapefruit aroma comes from, and the recipes take only a little of it.

Scrub first

Each recipe starts with scrubbing the grapefruit clean, since the peel goes into the must. Peel with a vegetable peeler and take the colored layer only.