Making Wine from Lemons: When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Wine!

You can actually make wine from almost any fruit or vegetable or anything else that will ferment and that includes lemons. But as anyone knows, lemons are very acidic and the juice really needs to be diluted a lot in order to make a drinkable wine. The problem is that this same dilution can remove both the body and flavor from the finished product. To help counteract this problem, you will either have to add body to the wine or make a lighter wine that tastes like lemon. So while making wine from lemons might have its challenges, it is very possible.

A Recipe for Success

This recipe for making wine from lemons is fairly simple. You will need 24 lemons, 6 lbs of granulated sugar, about 3 gallons of water, ½ tsp. each of grape tannin and pectic enzyme, 3 tsp of yeast nutrient, Campden tablets and wine yeast.

Boil approximately a gallon of the water and dissolve the sugar in it. Wash and peel the lemons making sure all the bitter white pith is removed. Then cut the lemons into halves and squeezed to extract the juice. This can be done with an electric juicer or by hand catching the seeds by using a sieve or small tea strainer. Remove the white pith from the peel and tie the remaining zest in a little bouquet garni or a nylon straining bag so it can easily be removed later. When making wine from lemons or any other fruits, you don’t want bits and pieces of something floating around in your wine

Put juice, pulp and zest in the primary container and add the boiled sugar water, as well as the rest of the water. Then add the tannin, pectic enzyme and yeast nutrient. You can add crushed Campden tablets at this time if necessary. At what point you add your yeast when making wine from lemons will depend on whether you use Campden or not.

The Lemony Results

When making wine from lemons, it can take some time to get the fermentation process started, but once it does, the specific gravity should drop rather quickly. Wait until your specific gravity reaches about 1.04, then add 16 oz of diluted sugar water to raise the specific gravity to 1.055 and wait for it to drop to 1.04 again at which time you can move your wine to the secondary container and fit with the airlock. Rack as normal about every 30 days and in about 4 months when the specific gravity has dropped to .990, you will have lemon wine!

Bookmark to: