If you want to learn how to make wine, one of the essential things you have to do is invert your sugar before you add it to your juice.

What is sugar inversion?

Before I get to that, let’s start with what yeast has to do to begin fermenting your juice, or more accurately, the sugar in your juice.

Yeast has to first break up household table sugar into two parts: glucose and sucrose. Once the yeast has used some energy doing the breakdown, then and only then can it start actually consuming the sugar and turning it into alcohol.

Inverting your sugar means that you are going to give your yeast a “head start” by breaking down the sugar in advance. This is an important step in learning how to make wine.

How do you do this?

Use about a cup of water and dissolve as much sugar as you can in a saucepan on the stove. Turn on the heat and get the solution close to boiling and add sugar until you can’t add any more – in other words, no more sugar will dissolve.

Now add the juice of 1 lemon. The acid in the lemon will “crack” the sugar molecules and break it down into sucrose and glucose, exactly what our yeast would have to do. Let your sugar mixture cook for about 15 minutes close to boiling (watch it carefully or it could boil over).

Now let it cool to room temperature and use this mixture to add sugar to your juice. You want to add enough to get the specific gravity up to about 1.1 before you put your yeast in.

If you want to learn how to make wine, first learn to invert your sugar. You will be surprised at the difference in flavor!

It’s thin, it’s acidic, and really just tastes like grape juice with a little alcohol in it. Not exactly what you would call a quality wine.

But, there IS a way to improve upon this flavor significantly. How do you do it?

First of all, find a wine from a wine shop that you really like. Many of these wines will list the subtle flavors that the wine has on the label. Examples of this are “hints of pepper”, and “blackberry overtones”. Concord juice concentrate has none of these.

So here’s the secret: Add these things to your grape juice before you start the fermentation, i.e., before you put your yeast in.

If you want “Blackberry overtones”, either buy fresh blackberries at the store, or you can even use canned blackberries in water. Be sure and crush them up to extract the juice or you can even use a juicer to get the juice out. You may want to thin the juice out a little by adding some water and then boiling on the stove to sterilize.

Another thing to add is regular raisans. Get a box of raisans, chop them up, and then boil them in water on the stove to extract the natural grape flavor and the tannins. Tannins are a big ingredient in finer wines and if there aren’t enough, your wine won’t have the right amount of “bite”.

One thing to watch out for: preservatives. If you buy juice or canned fruits, be sure and read the label to make sure there are NO preservatives. Preservatives will keep the juice from fermenting.

What about the “hint of pepper”? Simple, get some black peppercorns and put them in water and boil them to extract that peppery flavor.

You can even put everything above into one pot on the stove, boil it, let it cool, strain it, and then put it into the concord grape juice. Once you have done all of this, you are ready to throw in the yeast and let it ferment.

You will be amazed at the difference in flavor you’ll get. Try it and feel free to experiement by adding other fruits to the concord grape juice. Be sure and keep good notes just in case you hit on the “perfect” recipe so you can reproduce it later.