Raisin Wine Recipe: Homemade Wine From Raisins

The short answer: a 1 gallon batch of raisin wine uses 4 pounds of raisins, 1 pound of sugar, 1 gallon of water, 1 crushed Campden tablet, 1 teaspoon of pectic enzyme, 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient and a packet of wine yeast. You chop the raisins, pour boiling water over them with the sugar, wait 12 hours after the Campden and another 12 after the enzyme, then ferment on the pulp for seven days, press, and let it clear under an airlock.

The recipe is Jack Keller’s basic raisin wine, from his Requested Recipes Collection (compiled 2020). Keller’s view of the fruit is short and useful: raisins are simply dried grapes, so they “will make a wine almost as good or as bad as would the original grapes.” That is why raisin wine is the one recipe on this site you can start in any month of the year, from a shelf in the grocery store. New to winemaking? Read our step by step guide to making wine at home first, and browse the rest of the homemade wine recipes when this jug is going.

Raisin Wine at a Glance

The timeline is the same shape as most of Keller’s fruit wines: a week in the bucket, then months in a jug. The difference is that you never wait for a harvest.

Ingredients and Equipment

Golden or dark raisins

Keller gives one rule for choosing: dark raisins make a dark, somewhat brownish wine, and white or golden raisins make a white or golden wine. Flavor follows color in the same rough way, so pick by the wine you want in the glass. Buy plain raisins with nothing added, and read the ingredient line: if it lists only raisins, you are fine. Keller adds that a small black raisin sold as “currants” or “Zante currants” is really a raisin of the Black Corinth grape, and that it makes a decent wine too.

Why the raisins must be chopped

Keller’s method is to chop the raisins or run them through a mincer before the boiling water goes on. A whole raisin is a sealed bag of sugar and flavor, and chopping opens it to the water and the yeast. A food processor on short pulses does the job in a minute. Do not purée them to paste, because you still have to press the pulp out after a week.

Equipment

You need a primary fermenter with a cover, a kettle, a nylon straining bag or fine cloth for pressing, a 1 gallon jug with an airlock, a siphon, and bottles. A hydrometer is worth having here more than in most recipes, because raisins vary in how much sugar they carry. Our hydrometer guide shows how to read one.

Why the Recipe Waits 24 Hours Before the Yeast

12 hours for the Campden tablet

Dried fruit is not sterile, and Keller adds the crushed Campden tablet only once the must is at room temperature, then leaves it 12 hours. That pause lets the sulfite deal with wild yeast and bacteria and then fade enough for your own yeast to take over. Adding the yeast straight after the Campden is the common way to get a slow start. Our Campden tablets guide explains the dose and why the wait matters.

12 more hours for the pectic enzyme

The enzyme goes in second, and it gets its own 12 hours before the yeast. Raisins carry the same pectin as fresh grapes, and pectin is what leaves a fruit wine hazy for months. Giving the enzyme time in a cool must before fermentation starts is the cheap insurance. If you want to know what each powder in your cupboard does, read our guide to wine making additives.

Seven days on the pulp, then press

The week on the pulp is when the flavor comes out of the fruit. Stir every day so the raisins do not dry out on top. At the end, pour everything through a straining bag and press. Keller says to press the juice out of the pulp, so squeeze firmly; this is not a delicate fruit like the figs on our fig wine recipe.

How Strong Is Raisin Wine?

Keller gives no starting gravity for this recipe, and raisins vary by variety and dryness, so we cannot print a reliable figure. What we can say is where the sugar comes from. The 1 pound of added sugar alone adds about 46 gravity points to a gallon, using the arithmetic on our sugar calculator, which is a starting gravity near 1.046 before the raisins. The other four pounds of fruit supply the rest, and they supply most of it.

Measure before the yeast goes in

Take a hydrometer reading once the sugar has dissolved and the must has cooled. Our potential alcohol formula, (starting gravity minus 1) × 131.25, turns any reading into an estimate, and the wine ABV calculator does the sum for you once you have a final reading too.

If the reading is low

Do not just pour in more sugar by eye. The sugar calculator tells you how many ounces raise the gravity to the figure you want, and the extra sugar should be dissolved in a little of the must. If you are tempted to push past the yeast’s tolerance, read how to make wine stronger first; a raisin wine that stops sweet is harder to fix than one that finishes dry.

Date and Raisin Wine Variation

Keller has a second card in the same collection for a date and raisin wine, written for a reader whose friends in England had asked for one. His comment on the fruit is frank: dates make an acceptable wine, especially a sweet one, but an even better one with raisins for flavor, body and vinous complexity. He adds that it changes character completely if left to age in the dark for four to five years.

Date and raisin wine card

• 4 lb dates
• ¾ lb golden raisins or sultanas, chopped or minced
• 1 lb 2 oz demerara or light brown sugar
• 2 medium oranges and 2 small lemons (zest and juice)
• ¾ tsp pectic enzyme
• 1 crushed Campden tablet
• A pinch (⅛ tsp) of tannin
• 7¾ pints water
• 1 tsp yeast nutrient
• 1 packet wine yeast

Bring 2 quarts of the water to a rapid boil. Slice the dates lengthwise to free the pulp from the pits, and put both pulp and pits in the primary; Keller says the pits add flavor. Add the chopped raisins and the zest of all four citrus fruit, pour the boiling water over, cover and leave 12 hours. Dissolve the sugar in the remaining water and add it with the citrus juice, Campden, tannin and nutrient, then wait another 12 hours. Stir in the pectic enzyme, wait 12 more hours, and add the yeast. Stir twice a day for a week, strain and squeeze the pulp well, and move the liquid to a jug under an airlock. Rack after one month, then after two more months, then once more when it clears and stops dropping lees (2 to 4 months). Stabilize, sweeten to taste, wait two weeks and bottle. Keller says to age it two years before sampling.

Raisin Wine, Straw Wine and Passito

If you searched for raisin wine and found Italian dessert wines instead, those are a different thing. Straw wines and passito are made by drying fresh wine grapes, on mats or racks, before they are pressed, so the grapes are part dried rather than fully turned into pantry raisins. They are made from grape juice alone, with no water and no added sugar, and are usually sweet.

The recipe on this page is a country wine: store-bought raisins, water and sugar. It will not taste like a passito, and it is not meant to. It is closer in spirit to an old cellar standby, a cheap, reliable jug that clears well and takes to sweetening. If you want something with a vinous edge from fresh grapes instead, start with our Concord grape wine recipe.

Clearing, Sweetening and Bottling

Rack every 30 days

Keller’s schedule is a rack, top up and fresh airlock every 30 days, until the wine is clear and no new sediment appears over a full 30 day period. That second condition is the one to watch: a wine that looks clear but is still dropping a thin layer is not finished. Our guide to racking wine shows the siphon method, and how to clear wine covers what to do if it stays hazy.

Stabilize before you sweeten

Keller ends with “stabilize, sweeten to taste, wait 10 days.” Adding sugar to a wine that still holds live yeast restarts fermentation, sometimes in the bottle. Stabilize first, then add sugar a little at a time and taste. Our backsweetening guide walks through the amounts.

Aging

Keller’s note on the basic recipe is that, like most wines, it will improve with age. Give it a few months in the bottle before you judge it. Make and drink wine responsibly, and only if you are of legal drinking age.