In the following instructions for “how to make homemade wine”, it is important to note that Ribena is a perfect syrup that is famous for fermenting ‘wort’ made from fruits. Knowing how to make homemade wine, winemakers use this for extra special results. The rate to add it would be one to two bottles per gallon. When making wines from nuts, adding one or two bottles of Ribena per gallon would further improve the flavor and quality of the wine. Similarly, when making fresh fruit wines that give a red wine, one or two bottles or Ribena can be added to offset other fruit. In this way, you can ignore the SO2 preservative because the amount in Ribena will not be enough to stop the fermentation, but it would be better to add it at the vigorous fermentation stage, during the first ten days.
If you recommend using Ribena in your homemade wine recipes, keep in mind that each bottle contains approximately eight ounces of sugar, so reduce the amount of sugar in whatever recipe you are using. Ribena undiluted is not easily fermentable, because it contains a little over seven pounds of sugar per gallon and is preserved with 350 parts per million SO2, any one of which is capable of preventing fermentation.
Obviously, our goal in following the instructions on how to make homemade Ribena wine will be to reduce the amount of sugar to about three and a half pounds per gallon, using half Ribena and half water. By doing this we will reduce the SO2 preservative to around 175 parts per million. This amount is unlikely to prevent fermentation, although it might.
***All water used in the process was first boiled and allowed to cool naturally.
LEVEL 1
Two Ribena bottles were diluted with twice the amount of water (four full Ribena bottles). Yeast was added in the form of a core and the mixture was allowed to ferment for ten days.
STAGE 2
After ten days of fermentation, two bottles of Ribena and one bottle of water were added and the mixture was left to ferment for another ten days.
STAGE 3
After a total of twenty days of fermentation, two bottles of Ribena and one more bottle of water were added. Fermentation was then allowed to continue to completion, taking, in all, three months. The result was a nice round wine with a delicious but not too strong flavor of fresh blackcurrants.
Stage 3 took into account that while most of the SO2 would have been removed during fermentation by adding those last two bottles, it was actually raising the total SO2 content to 175 parts per million. Fearing that the yeast might weaken a bit at this stage, it was decided to remove the SO2 in the last two bottles by raising the bottle temperature to 70 degrees. against
If you want to include this in your homemade wine recipes and don’t have a proper thermometer, place the bottles in a saucepan of water and during your homemade wine effort, slowly increase the temperature until the Ribena in the bottles has increased in volume. Enough to reach the rims of the bottles. The temperature is high enough to expel the SO2 and the heat must be cut off immediately. Bottle caps must be removed before heating. All fermentation was carried out in narrow-necked bottles corked with cotton, placing fermentation closures after ten days. Racking was not carried out until one month after the last addition. Monthly transfers were continued until fermentation ceased. Even at this early stage the wine was pleasant to drink, but it had vastly improved by the age of six months.
