Um, Did You Know You Can Make Wine in Your Instant Pot?

The Instant Pot is one of the biggest food trends of the past few years, and it is only getting bigger. People are obsessed with it because it does the work of seven other appliances and takes up less space in the kitchen. It can pressure cook, slow cook, cook rice, steam food, make yogurt, warm food, and sauté food. And now it looks like the Instant Pot is actually an eight-in-one machine, because you can even use it to make wine.

Yes, wine!

It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true. Munchies’ Mayukh Sen writes that food blogger and recipe developer David Murphy of FoodNService figured out how to make Instant Pot wine.

Murphy says the idea of making wine in an Instant Pot actually started with a meme that was going around Facebook asking, “Why hasn’t someone figured out how to put grapes in the crockpot and have it turn into wine? It’s like no one tries anymore.”

It was a joke, but Murphy ran with it, and he eventually developed a recipe that he says turns grape juice, sugar, and red wine yeast into drinkable wine in just about 10 days.

The ingredients are very simple, but the recipe does have a lot of steps. The full instructions are available on Murphy’s blog, but it involves filling the Instant Pot with a 64-ounce bottle of grape juice, a cup of sugar, and the red wine yeast and then using the Instant Pot’s yogurt-making setting to keep the mixture at around 80 degrees for about 48 hours to let the yeast go wild in its warm sugar bath. (This does involve opening and closing the lid vent every six to eight hours.)

Get the recipe: How to Make Instant Pot Wine

After 48 hours, you’ll have a cloudy, fizzy, dark-red liquid that’s ready to be bottled and stored in a cool, dark place. Murphy says you can leave it for up to a month, but eight days is generally enough time to lose its fizziness and develop a nice flavor.

The specific flavor of the Instant Pot wine will of course depend a lot on what type of grape juice you put into it. Murphy used basic Welch’s grape juice, and wrote that “the nose of the wine has hints of chocolate and dark cherries, and it had a very palatable wine taste.”

Instant Pot winemaking is not exactly instantaneous, but Murphy says using the Instant Pot will greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to go from juice to a drinkable wine. It might not win any winemaking awards, but Murphy said the wine tastes better than a lot of very cheap wines he’s had, and he told Munchies that he’d guess the wine tastes like an eight- to 12-dollar table wine. That’s not bad for a 10-day Instant Pot experiment, and you really can’t put a price on being able to say, “Try this wine, I made it myself!”

Of course, this raises the question: If you can make wine in an Instant Pot, what else can you make in an Instant Pot? This is a big part of the reason everyone loves this super-versatile kitchen gadget.

Would you try Instant Pot wine?

This post originally ran on Kitchn. See it there: Um, Did You Know You Can Make Wine in Your Instant Pot?