Basically I agree with Andy. Once you open it you should use it right away.
Also with kits, you generally get what you pay for. A higher price kit will
maker very nice wine. A medium price kit will make mediocre wine. And so
forth. Also all the additives are set for making a whole batch.

When mixing grape concentrate with fruit, you can improve the fruit but the
fruit will generally dominate and the high price for the better kits
probably do not mater. For blending with fruit, the cheaper tinned
concentrate will probably do just fine. In fact, for making light wine
fruit wines (apple, peach, etc.), one of the best grape concentrates to add
is Welch's frozen Niagara concentrate. It blends very nicely with fruits
and makes a very nice wine on it's own. Very cheap. See Jack Keller's site
for frozen fruit recipes.

As far as carboy size, even when making a kit, you can make it in smaller
carboy's. Just use several of them. When you rack, do all of them at one
time and rack into a common bucket so they blend and then put them back into
as many carboys as you need. It is just convenient to use one big carboy.
An advantage of using multiple carboys, especially after the initial
fermentation, is that you can bottle part of it early and leave the rest for
longer bulk aging.

Ray

"JEP62" wrote in message
oups.com...

Droopy wrote:

I have been toying with the idea of getting a kit wine and making only
half and saving the other half to use as grape concentrate additions
for fruit wines that use them as body enhancers.

..snipped

It may be easier just to make the whole kit and then use the wine when
you make the fruit wine. You could either blend after the fruit wine is
made or use some wine instead of water when starting the fruit wine.

If the latter, personally, I would get the yeast going in the fruit
wine before adding the kit wine to reduce the chance of oxidizing. You
would also have to take the aclohol content of the wine into account
when calculating sugar additions to the fruit wine.


Andy