Pumpkin Wine Recipe: Spiced Homemade Pumpkin Wine

The short answer: a 1 gallon batch of pumpkin wine uses 5 pounds of grated pumpkin flesh, 3½ pounds of sugar, 6½ pints of water, ½ ounce of citric acid, pectic enzyme, yeast nutrient and energizer, one Campden tablet and a wine yeast. You pour boiling sugar water over the grated pumpkin, ferment on the pulp for three days, strain it into a jug and rack it a few times over about five months. The wine is ready the next year, in time for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

The recipe comes from Jack Keller’s Requested Recipes Collection (compiled 2020), which he adapted from Leo Zanelli’s Home Winemaking from A to Z. Keller says Zanelli “swears by it.” New to winemaking? Start with our full guide to making wine at home; this page assumes you know what racking and an airlock are. For other fruit and flower recipes, see the homemade wine recipe collection.

Pumpkin Wine at a Glance

The timeline above is Keller’s. Count roughly five months from the first day to the bottle, then leave the bottles alone until the next autumn. If you start now, expect to open your first bottle in the fall of next year, not this Thanksgiving.

One more thing from Keller’s notes: the sugar is high. Depending on the yeast, the recipe makes either a dry wine of about 18% alcohol or a lower alcohol sweet wine. That choice is made at the yeast, so read the yeast section below before you buy anything.

Which Pumpkin to Use

Keller’s recipe says only “pumpkin flesh,” with no variety named. Our recommendation is to use a cooking pumpkin (sometimes sold as a pie or sugar pumpkin) with firm, sound flesh, and to skip pumpkins that are soft, moldy or bruised, because the wine is only as good as what goes into it.

Fresh pumpkin, not canned

The recipe works with raw flesh that you grate yourself, and that is the only version we give a card for. Peel the pumpkin, scoop out the seeds and stringy middle, weigh out 5 pounds of flesh and grate it. Keller recommends a mechanical grater and says not to chop chunks in a blender. A food processor with a grating disc does the job in minutes.

If you cannot find pumpkin

Keller writes in the same collection that Hubbard squash makes a wine very similar to pumpkin wine, and that zucchini makes a very poor one. If your store has no cooking pumpkins, Hubbard is the substitute his notes support.

Choosing a Yeast: Dry or Sweet Pumpkin Wine

With 3½ pounds of sugar in a gallon, the yeast decides what the wine becomes (to see what other sugar amounts do to your gravity, try the sugar calculator for wine). Keller lists these options:

• Dry and strong (about 18% alcohol): a high alcohol yeast such as Lalvin K1V-1116 or Wyeast 3347 (Eau de Vie), both able to handle the extreme sugar.
• Moderate and sweet: Red Star Côte des Blancs for 13% alcohol with about 5% residual sugar.
• Slightly less sweet: Lalvin 71B-1122, ICV-D47, Lalvin Simi-White or White Labs WLP730 for 14% alcohol and 4% residual sugar.
• Least sweet of the sweet group: Lalvin AMH, BGY, CY3079, ICV-D80 or White Labs WLP720 for 15% alcohol and 3% residual sugar.

Whichever you pick, read the yeast’s own sheet for nutrient and temperature needs, as Keller advises. For a comparison of strains, see the best wine yeasts.

Spicing It: When to Add the Spice

Keller’s recipe has no spice in it at all. The pumpkin flavor is the flavor of the wine. If you want a spiced pumpkin wine, treat what follows as our suggestion, not Keller’s method, and go carefully, because spice cannot be taken back out.

Wait for the secondary

Do not put spice in the primary with the pulp. Fermenting for three days on the pumpkin already does the flavor work, and the cap of pulp would soak up anything you add. Once the wine is in its jug and has been racked the first time, you can judge how much pumpkin character is left.

Use a bag and taste daily

Tie a small amount of whole spice, such as a cinnamon stick or a few cloves, in a sanitized muslin bag and hang it in the jug. Taste a spoonful every day or two. Pull the bag out the moment it tastes right, since cloves in particular go from pleasant to overpowering fast. Start with less than you think you need.

Why whole spices, not powder

Ground spice clouds the wine and does not rack out cleanly. Whole spice in a bag can be removed on the day you choose, which is the point.

Pressing the Pulp and Topping Up

Straining

After three days on the pulp, pour the must through a nylon straining bag held over a clean bucket and let the pumpkin drip drain. Keller says drip drain; he does not call for squeezing hard, so let gravity do most of the work and press lightly at the end.

Topping up

Pumpkin holds on to a lot of liquid, so you may not get a full gallon. Keller’s instruction is: if you did not recover a full gallon, wait 5 days and top up as necessary. Top up with a similar wine, or with cooled boiled water if the gap is small.

Racking

Rack after two weeks and again 30 days later, topping up and refitting the airlock each time. Our guide to how to rack wine shows the siphon method.

Sweetening and Bottling

After the three-month rest, Keller says to rack, stabilize, sweeten if desired (he adds that you are unlikely to need to), wait 3 weeks for dead yeast to fall out and then rack into bottles. If you picked a yeast that leaves some sugar, you may not need to sweeten at all. If you chose a high alcohol yeast and want it softer, read how to backsweeten wine, and stabilize first so the sugar does not restart fermentation.

Looking for other seasonal recipes? Apple wine and cranberry wine both fit the fall calendar. Make and drink wine responsibly, and only if you are of legal drinking age.