2025 Red Blend

One of the gifts Susan gave me during my Birthday Week was a wine kit.

We didn’t make it down to Prosser this past year to get any grapes so this kit will end up being our entry into the Wine Competition at the fair this Fall.

The kit purports to be grapes from the Yakima Valley. It’s called a Red Blend. Not much more detail than that.

We started the kit today. Making wine from a kit is just about as simple as you could make it. This one comes with a variety of chemicals, grape juice concentrate and wine yeast.

After cleaning and sterilizing my fermenter vessel and all the assorted tools, we completed the Day One tasks. That involved mixing up some Bentonite with 12 cups of warm water, which works as a clarifying agent, adding the grape juice, topping off with water and pitching the yeast. That’s it!

The Original Gravity was 1.082 which gives this wine the potential to be 12% ABV.

We tasted the must and it tastes like good ol’ Welch's Grape Juice.

It’s just sitting there now, waiting for the yeast to activate. We will pretty much leave it alone over the next two weeks, at which point we’ll take another gravity reading to see if it’s ready for the next step, which will be racking to a clean fermenter and more clarifying.

In any event, we are back in the wine game!