Juice to Better Wine: Tricks & Pitfalls By kourofskywine on June 7, 2026
- rochesteraws
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
Working with grape juice is often considered a first step in the winemaking ladder: kit to juice to grapes. A generally shared winemaking belief is that working with whole grapes is the goal and that one never goes “backward.” It’s just-not-the-done-thing! |
I used to believe that working with juice was okay if you were purchasing fresh juice for white wines that were not “aromatic,” such as for Chardonnay but probably not Gewurztraminer, where grape-skin contact was helpful in expressing aromas and flavors. In my view juice did not make good red wines. And reconstituted grape juice was right out! Until, that is, I had a little problem that needed fixing. Wow, did my world view change. |
It happened one year when I decided to make some wine from the grapes of an Italian varietal grown in California, called Dolcetto. For whatever reason, I mismanaged my oak addition and found I had wildly over-oaked it. This amount of oak wasn’t going to fade away with aging. Fining agents don’t work especially well for removing excess oak from a wine. Best practice is to add unoaked wine to balance out the flavor and aroma. It just so happened that I received an email from my wine club offering Chilean juice. Fate was calling to me. I ordered some Carménère as reconstituted juice, as it’s similar in style to Dolcetto. |
I was successful in blending out the oak in my Dolcetto and the final wine was quite nice. But I had three gallons of pure Carménère left over, which I bottled and promptly forgot about. A few years later I stumbled upon it and thought I should try it. What a surprise to find it had developed into a very smooth, enjoyable wine similar to Pinot Noir. I never thought that such enjoyable wine could come from reconstituted juice. Though I still feel that wine from grapes makes a better wine, I have continued to work with Chilean juice. It fills certain niches in my cellar. |
But this type of juice presents its own challenges and can be problematic if not approached with care. This article will discuss how I approach making better wine from juice. |