This is a good basic intro to winemaking and it's easy and cheap for anyone to do. All you need to purchase equipment-wise is: a one gallon glass jug, an airlock, and some champagne yeast from a wine or beer supply store or online. Actually if you are willing to drink or cook or serve friends for new years with some cheap wine, you can get a big jug of wine from the liquor store in a gallon jug, that's what I did! save the lid for later on...
Assuming you have the above equipment, here's the recipe
you can use any frozen juice except I didn't like orange or lemonade. You can use white grape peach, white grape raspberry, grape, fruit punch type blends are ok too. just make sure on the list of ingredients that there are no preservatives, which usually in frozen juice there aren't anyway
2 cans (12 oz size) frozen concentrate juice, thawed to room temperature
3 cups sugar
warm water to make one gallon (like lukewarm, not too hot or you'll kill yeast)
1/2 package champagne yeast (fold the top of the package over and store remaining yeast in fridge for another batch)
stir all of this together and put in your clean jug. Attach your airlock. set in a warm place, like indoors somewhere where you are comfortable (around 70 degrees). The juice will take off and start to ferment in a day or so. When it quits in about a week to ten days, pour your wine into a clean container, wash out your jug thoroughly and put it back into the jug with airlock to clarify and for all the yeast particles to fall out of suspension. Technically you can drink it at this stage, but if you do, let it air out for a while first (1 hr or so) because it will taste yeasty. let set for about 30 days and then it's ready to bottle or drink. If you taste it and it still tastes yeasty to you, let it air out (breathe)for about an hour. I've made several batches of this in the last few years and bottled it.
below is a batch of wine I'm currently making, white grape raspberry
and an airlock for those of you that aren't familiar with this, it works like a sink trap to keep bad stuff out of your wine while letting co2 escape
