Is your Ribena pure juice or concentrate? I would just pour the bottles in, add sugar, water, pectic enzyyme, campden, all the usual stuff and taste it before you toss in the yeast. Get it so the sg on the hydrometer reads 1.090 or something like that.

If it's pure juice, then you may not need water, but if it's concentrate, you surely will!

Ribena is a concentrate.

Use a hydrometer to measure sugar content of the must, add Ribena until you reach your desired sugar content. I've never tried Ribena as a wine base, I may try it myself!

Hi mydaniella23elton,

Hope this one would help you a lot.

Here it is:

Obviously, our aim when following the how to homemade wine directions with Ribena will be to reduce the amount of sugar to about three and a half pounds per gallon, by using half Ribena and half water. In doing this, we shall reduce the SO2 preservative to around 175 parts per million. This amount is unlikely to prevent fermentation, though it could do so.

***All water used in the process was first boiled and allowed to cool naturally.

STAGE 1
Two bottles of Ribena were diluted with twice the amount of water (four Ribena bottles full). Yeast in the form of a nucleus was added and the mixture allowed to ferment for ten days.

STAGE 2
After ten days' fermentation, two bottles of Ribena and one bottle of water were added and the mixture allowed to ferment for a further ten days.

STAGE 3
After a total of twenty days' fermentation, two bottles of Ribena and one more bottle of water were added. Fermentation was then allowed to carry on to completion, taking, in all, three months. The result was a good, round wine flavored delightfully but not too strongly of fresh blackcurrants.

At stage 3 it was borne in mind that, while most of the SO2 would have been driven off during fermentation by adding those last two bottles, it was, in effect, bringing the total SO2 content up to 175 parts per million. Fearing that the yeast might be just a little weakened at this stage, it was decided to drive off the SO2 in the last two bottles by raising the temperature of the to 70 deg. C.

If you want to include this in your how to homemade wine recipes and have no suitable thermometer, stand the bottles in a saucepan of water and during your how to homemade wine endeavor, slowly raise 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 drive off the SO2 and the heat should be cut off at once. The caps of the bottles must be removed before heating. The whole of fermentation was carried out in narrow-necked bottles plugged with cotton wool, fermentation locks being fitted after ten days. Racking was not carried out until one month after the last addition. Monthly racking followed until fermentation ceased. Even at this early stage the wine was nice to drink, but it had improved vastly at the age of six months.