The Best Homemade Wine Recipe from Ribena

A wonderful syrup made of excellent quality Ribena could well be added to fermenting 'must haves' to get special results. If you use Ribena in winemaking, you should reduce the amount of sugar accordingly in whichever homemade wine recipes you have in mind. The addition of one or two bottles of Ribena per gallon can make a vast improvement to the flavor and even quality of the wine.

Best of all, there is no expensive fruit to buy, no crushing, nor much to do at all. Most importantly, Ribena is treated with pectin-destroying enzyme, which means that you could boil it if you wished without fear of pectin clouding the wine. What you wish to achieve when making wine with Ribena is to lessen the amount of sugar to about three and a half pounds per gallon. In doing this, you will lessen the preservative and not likely prevent fermentation. Here are the steps to use for the addition of Ribena syrup. The water used in the procedure was first boiled and cooled naturally.

Stage 1: Two bottles of Ribena were diluted with twice the amount of H2O (four Ribena bottles full). Yeast was added and the mixture was allowed to ferment for ten days.

2: Next, after ten days, two additional bottles of Ribena and one additional bottle of water are added and the batch is allowed to ferment for another ten days.

Step 3: Finally, after twenty days of fermentation, add two more bottles of Ribena and one bottle of water. This should be allowed to ferment until completion, usually, three months. The result is a good, round wine flavored of fresh blackcurrants.

Now, the whole fermentation was carried out in narrow-necked bottles plugged with cotton wool and fermentation locks being fitted after ten days. Racking was not carried out until one month after the last addition while monthly racking followed until fermentation ceased. Even at this early stage the wine was nice to drink, but it had improved enormously at the age of 6 months.