Anyone ever had or made wine from any of the typical grapes one might fine in your grocer’s produce section?
I guess the main varieties are the seedless red grapes, concord grapes and whatever those oblong green ones are.
It must exist, but where do you find it? Is it any good? Can you take it a step further and find sparkling wine, domestic port or brandies made from the same grapes?
I’ve had Concord wine and it’s decent, although it has a bad reputation as being way too sweet. I agree: in fact I’d drink it regularly if it weren’t for the cloying sweetness as I like the taste of Concord grapes (which definitely comes through in the wine.) Try a small glass of some as an after-dinner wine (popular varieties are Mogen David and Manischevitz: or if anyone can recommend any that aren’t so sweet as these I’d love to try 'em.)
California seedless wines, OTOH, I wouldn’t think would be that great because they’re basically tasteless to begin with. But I’ve never had any.
ETA you can find Concord wines in any liquor store and even in many grocery stores.
Ludovic, if you’re in RI, you should be able to go to a winery within a day’s drive and get some wine made from table grapes, which are all Native grapes (v. labrusca, not v. vinifera; “Native” grapes are native to N.America). They are generally cold-hardier and easier to grow (note the fact that they are literal weeds in the NE forests) than European-derived grapes.
Unfortunately, they’re just really not as good.
A few clever winemakers in NY can do decent things with a Cayuga grape, but the other stuff is too cloyingly sweet. Further, there’s an underlying negative taste to native grapes that wine drinkers describe as “foxiness.” If you can get down to NYC or over to New Paltz, NY (across the river from Poughkeepsie), you can visit Vintage New York or Rivendell Winery, respectively, and sample hundreds of wines from all over NYS, including native grapes.
You would not, generally, want to make wine from Concord or Thompson Seedless grapes at home. It would likely range from insipid to awful. Better to buy some juice from a winemakers’/homebrew catalogue and use that. Better still to just go to a winery. In my experience, homemade wine, unlike homebrewed beer, is almost universally awful.
Wow, how the heck did I miss that?!
This concord business, is it actually wine or grape juice that’s had alcohol added to it? Do you know off hand if the proof is any different than most table wines?
I don’t mind sweetness…I’m a huge fan of Riesling, Gewertztraminer and tawny port.
I’d imagine anything made from hose seedless red grapes would be incredibly too sweet to drink, too.
No, it’s real wine. Real, fermented grape juice, just like any other wine.
So do I … but you ask too much of the native grape, except when handled by experts. It’s sweetness w/o good character.
I am in RI. We’re actually planning on heading to the Sakonnet Vineyard in Little Compton, RI this weekend. I don’t remember seeing them before there, although I wasn’t looking for them. I will be sure to now.
Thanks for the resources. We will definitely have to hit up those vineyards when we get to New York.
I don’t think the usual varieties of seedless table grapes have enough sugar content to make good wine, aside from other considerations. I’ve had the opportunity to taste grapes being grown for wine in the Napa valley and they were much sweeter than the grapes we typically get at the grocery store.
Also true.
This is basically it. You can get wine from Concord grapes, even at home, but it really is very different to my palate then wine made with European grapes. Even though it isn’t spiked grape juice, that’s what it tastes like.
Many wines from upstate NY are made from native varietals. There are some folks that really like it, and it sells well enough, but IMO it’s a pale comparison to wines produced with better varietals.
I actually work at the Soho location… come on in and I’ll pour for you. And if you have any wine questions, fire away.
Uh oh! 
My husband and I spent yesterday afternoon picking merlot grapes in Sonoma Valley, then crushed and destemmed. It’s our second year making wine at home, and last year’s batch (not yet bottled) isn’t that bad. Actually, I’ve tasted a lot of home winemaker’s wines in this area, and they are often really pretty good.
I wouldn’t even bother trying to make wine from most table grapes (Concord being the exception, I like wines made from Concord grapes, but I grew up drinking it.) Like cher3 said, Brix and acid levels are just too low, and the flavors just aren’t all that interesting.
I think most table grapes are around 16-18 Brix, while wine grapes are anywhere from 22-28.
Much sweeter, and with better acid levels. (Our merlot grapes came in at 24 Brix yesterday and tasted really great.)
We did make wine from Welch’s concentrate in one of my wine classes, but we had to add an assload of sugar to it to get the Brix up. It was…drinkable. Kind of.
That was my experience with home-made wine as well. OK…maybe. But I can get much better for much less than I spent on materials and time, so why bother?
OTOH, I have yet to find a brewery that can match my home-brew across the categories. 
Some folks on the River Cottage forum were making ‘turbo cider’ with cartons of store-bought apple juice - I don’t see why the same thing couldn’t actually be done with grape juice - as long as adjustments were made for sugar content etc.
Yeah, there’s plenty of people who will take exception to that comment. If you live in wine country, you can get excellent grapes and if you have the proper setup, you can make a pretty palatable wine. My friend in Glen Ellen has a garage that is built into the hillside, so it remains pretty cool year round. I ain’t no oenophile, but his wine was pretty damn good. He actually had people giving him grapes since the harvest was so robust.
I made wine from Welch’s in high school biology, and it wasn’t very good. Tasted foxy, right?
Wooo! Prison wine!
heh. Well, I opened this thread with the intent of notifying your husband about it, since I’d read about his wine-making adventures in LJ, but it looks like I won’t have to.
I only know one person who makes homemade wine and, while year to year it’s variable, it’s more than drinkable. His 2003 Zinfandel was a wine I’d happily drink every day. I know it’s not saying much, but it’s better than any “two buck Chuck” I’ve had from Trader Joe’s. We buy about $500-$700 worth of wine grapes every year, de-stem them, crush them with a grape press, and make a shitload of wine. IIRC, it’s something on the cusp of 200 bottles. Not bad for a basement in a suburb of Chicago (Oak Park). Come to think of it, we’re coming up on wine-making time. Fun times.
I’m not a huge wine snob, I’ve drunk quite a few vintages fine and not so fine from all over the world (I prefer beer, however), and I have a decent palate for the gustatory standards in wine, but I truly do appreciate an Ohio Lake Erie appellation. There are many varietals that local wineries have adapted, but the tradition is firmly rooted in German immigrants and German wine standards.
Many of the traditional wines of the area are made with native Island Grape varieties, Catawba grapes, and Concord grapes. I agree they are a bit sweet and very foxy, but they are best served chilled at a Summer Party. I like to think of them as “easy going” wines, imminently drinkable on a hot summer’s day by the water. You might like them, Ludovic as they aren’t quite as sweet and display a much higher standard of winemaking than the sweeter wines that you cite.
I’m a food snob but not a wine snob, so I’ve never run across the term “foxy” as applied to wine (to women, yes, but…) Can some oenophile explain in less esoteric terms what foxiness is?
Also, if you wanted to have a wine with the flavor of concord grapes but that was less sickeningly sweet than Mogen David, couldn’t you blend them with other, drier grapes?
Chef, I have actually thought of blending M-D with other wines to produce something similar. Perhaps a Niagara wine, which also tastes somewhat of the Concord despite not being made of that grape, but which is slightly not sweet enough for me.
It is possible to make non-awful wine from native Labrusca grapes – lots of New York State wineries do so.
I think Manischevitz and Mogen David are at the bottom of the pack. That;'s not a slap at Jewish winemakers – Try Barry (Cribari) sacramental wine sometime, amnd you’ll see that Catholics can do it just as badly. But it’s harder to come by.
a bit better are Taylor Lake Country White and Widmer’s Lake Niagara. I love this stuff, but Pepper Mill thinks it’s awful. It’s not as sweet, though, but “fruity”.
Several steps up are the wines put out by Bully Hill. Unfortunately most of their varieties aren’t available unless you live near them, and even in Massachusetts only a couple of theor varieties are easy to get. They aren’t remotely as sweet as any of the above, and you might not realize you’re drinking Labrusca wine.
There are a lot of New York wineries that make native wines, but they tend to bbe hard to find outside the area, and lots of them have short lifetimes. You have to go to the Finger Lakes and sample them and buy them.
and now is a really good time for that.