Lemon Wine Recipe: Homemade Wine From Fresh Lemons

The short answer: yes, wine can be made from lemons, but lemon juice alone makes a thin, sharp wine. Jack Keller’s fresh lemon recipe for 1 gallon uses 8 large lemons, a 10 ounce can of white grape juice concentrate, 1 pound 14 ounces of sugar, grape tannin, pectic enzyme, yeast nutrient and a champagne yeast. The grape juice is there to give the wine body. To scale the sugar to your own batch, use the wine sugar calculator. Ferment until the gravity falls to 1.020 (about 8 days), rack, finish to 1.000, then age 6 months in the jug and 6 more in the bottle.

This page is about wine from fresh lemons. If you want the bottled lemon juice version, that is a different recipe with a different method: see our skeeter pee recipe. For the general method, start with our guide to making wine from fruit, and browse more ideas in the homemade wine recipe collection.

Lemon Wine at a Glance

Count a little over a year from the first day to the first glass. Lemon wine is not a quick drink, and the aging is where the sharp edges soften. To know your alcohol level, read the gravity at the start and at the end with a hydrometer and enter both in our wine ABV calculator.

Why Lemons Need Help

Keller sums up the problem in one sentence: lemons are very acidic, so they need a great deal of dilution to make a palatable wine, and that dilution strips the finished wine of both body and character. His answer is to either add a body-building ingredient or accept a thinner wine that tastes of lemon.

Option one: add body

The first recipe below does this with white grape juice concentrate. The grape juice brings sugar, color and a vinous background that a pot of watered-down lemon juice does not have. If you have made wine from juice before, the idea is the same as in our guide to making wine from grape juice.

Option two: a light lemon wine

The other recipes simply add the taste. They make a lighter, clean, lemon-flavored wine, and they are quicker to age. Both approaches are in this page, so pick by what you want in the glass.

Lighter Lemon Wine

Keller gives two more recipes that skip the grape concentrate. They are thinner by design, so serve them chilled and do not expect red-wine weight. Both use a champagne yeast, 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient and ¼ teaspoon of grape tannin, with water added to make 1 gallon.

Lemon wine (2): lemon segments and zest

• 6 to 8 medium lemons and 2 pounds of finely granulated sugar
• ½ teaspoon of pectic enzyme
• Dissolve the sugar in boiling water. Grate the zest of 3 lemons, peel all the lemons, remove every bit of white pith and break the fruit into segments.
• Put the segments and zest in a nylon straining bag, tie it closed, set it in the primary, mash the segments and pour the boiling water over. Cover until cool.
• Add the tannin, nutrient and pectic enzyme, and 24 hours later add the yeast. Squeeze the bag daily to release juice for 8 days, then drain the bag and ferment 3 more days.
• Rack to a secondary and fit an airlock. Rack again in 3 weeks and once more 3 weeks later. When the wine has fermented dry, taste it; if too dry, stabilize and sweeten, wait 10 days and bottle. Age 6 to 12 months.

Keller adapted this one from Terry Garey’s The Joy of Home Winemaking.

Lemon wine (3): juice only

• 6 to 8 medium lemons and 2½ pounds of granulated sugar, with no pectic enzyme
• Grate the zest of 1 lemon into the primary, then add the juice of all the lemons, the sugar, water, tannin and nutrient. Stir well to dissolve the sugar.
• Wait 12 hours and add the yeast. Ferment 2 days, strain into a secondary and fit an airlock.
• Rack every 30 days until the gravity reaches 1.000. Stabilize, wait 10 days, rack into bottles and age 1 year.

This is Keller’s adaptation of Leo Zanelli’s Home Winemaking from A to Z. It is the simplest of the three.

Lemon Wine vs Skeeter Pee

Both are lemon wines, but they are built differently, so choose by the ingredient you have and the wait you can stand.

If you want a drink on the table in weeks rather than months, the skeeter pee recipe is the bottled-juice version. If you have a bag of fresh lemons and patience, make the recipe above.

Zest, Not Pith

What Keller removes

In recipe 2 Keller says to peel the lemons and remove all the white pith before the fruit goes in the bag. In the other two he takes only the zest of a few lemons and uses the juice. In all three, the yellow zest gives the lemon oil flavor and the white layer is left out of the main fruit.

Our tip: grate lightly

This part is our recommendation, not Keller’s. Grate only the yellow surface and stop when you reach white, because the pith tastes bitter and that bitterness will still be there after a year of aging. Wash the lemons first, and if you can find unwaxed fruit, use it for the zest.

Pectic enzyme and clearing

Recipes 1 and 2 include pectic enzyme to break down the fruit pectin and help the wine clear. If you want to know what else is on the shelf, our guide to wine making additives covers tannin, nutrient and the rest.

Sweetening and yeast

Recipes 2 and 3 end with stabilizing and sweetening to taste, and our guide to how to backsweeten wine shows how. For a champagne yeast, see our picks in the best wine yeasts. Make and drink wine responsibly, and only if you are of legal drinking age.