Wine Making: How to Make a Naturally Red Watermelon Wine

/ winebyari

Since it’s watermelon season, I decided to make Watermelon Wine. After researching recipes, I realized it’s one of the hardest fruit wines to make due to how quickly it spoils. Additionally, it doesn’t maintain it’s red color and changes to a yellow/orange color.

My Experience
For some reason, I thought my experience would be different if I juiced my watermelon first. Ahhh, no…my wine didn’t spoil, but it still turned yellow/orange. Who wants to drink a yellow/orange Watermelon Wine? I don’t!!! It’s just not right for my mental :?.

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The Solution
Most winemakers add red food coloring to get it back to red. However, I figured there has got to be a way to keep it red. So, Apples came to mind 🍎. When you cut a apple, it begins to change brown due to oxidation. However, you can stop it by adding an acidic juice (i.e., Lemon, or Lime juice). So, I added fresh lime juice to my next batch.

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After fermenting in my primary, I noticed the juice was still red! Then I transferred it to my secondary, and watched as the days and weeks passed….still red!

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So, if you are looking to make Watermelon Wine, add some lime juice to keep it’s natural color.

11 thoughts on “Wine Making: How to Make a Naturally Red Watermelon Wine”

  3. Just curious about how your watermelon wine turned out? Did it stay pink? I have about 6 gallons of watermelon wine that we will probably be bottling this weekend. It is a very pretty clear golden yellow. All of the pretty pink color sunk to the bottom. I would love to know if your addition of lime juice helped it to retain the color long term without affecting the flavor in a negative way. I would greatly appreciate your reply, regardless of how yours turned out! Thank you, Tammy

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      • I actually started our watermelon wine in July 2016 and it has been bulk aging since then! After it fermented out, the alcohol was overpoweringly strong. In addition to the 6 gallons of watermelon, we have about 6 gallons of homemade blackberry, 25 gallons of peach, and 11 gallons of banana! Total about 50 gallons that has been bulk aging because we just got too busy to deal with it all. I forgot that I had about a quart of watermelon juice left that I had frozen for topping up. I made simple syrup with it last night and added to the wine because it still had a “sharp” taste that I can’t figure out. Maybe the alcohol… Anyway, the additional sweetening really helped the flavor and it is almost the consistency of an ice wine but definitely has the watermelon essence. I just miss that color but don’t want to add any artificial coloring to it so it will stay as is. I need to stabilize it since adding the extra sugar and we will bottle this weekend. Then on to all the other bottling eventually! We have been making homemade wines since Nov. 2014, with a total of 34 batches of varying sizes. Over half of them have been completely homemade with the rest being kits. We enjoy the summer wine kits with lower ABV and instead of hassling with bottling them, we put them into kegs in our kegerator! This way there is always a nice chilled glass of wine ready!

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      • That’s awesome…I took a little break because I was pregnant, but I’m slowly getting back into it. I like making my own blended recipes and seldom use a kit just because I like being creative. Did, post the recipes yet, but I’ve made a Pineapple Orange Chardonnay, Mint Moscato, Chocolate Salted Caremel Port(Kit), Cab Frac (Sweet Red). I also like making my wine high ABV (16-18%). Excited to get back to it, because my stock is really low now. I plan on posting more this summer, starting with some of the recipes listed above.

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      • I absolutely agree that making from scratch is more rewarding but it takes so much longer that we fill in with kits occasionally when our stock is low or it isn’t time to bottle. Some of our wines have been very high ABV! As much as we have already learned, there is still so much more to learn! We make at least one batch of blackberry each year from berries we pick at my mom’s. The peach is from Parker County TX peaches. We made some before & loved it so much. That’s why we decided to make the huge batch. We live in Weatherford, TX. If you love port wine, you MUST look for Messina Hoff port and any of their other wines. In fact, you need to visit their vineyard and maybe even stomp grapes! They are very fun people and we love their wines. We have made blueberry, strawberry, strawberry chocolate (yum!), several blended apple ciders and apple wines, plum, raspberry, cherry, apricot, black velvet apricot, & prickly pear. We joke that wine DRINKING is our hobby and so we have to make wine to afford our hobby. I will look forward to seeing your latest recipes and maybe trying some that you have already made! And congrats on the new baby!

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