Frederick wrote with respect to vinting a blackberry wine similar to a
locally produced commercial wine
" PS - If you like the wine from that winery, why not get a bottle of their
wine, bring it home, run every test and measurement that you can, and
shoot for the same numbers they ended up with. IOW - use_their_
success as_your_ guide."

Frederick, Darlene...This is of course the best way to approach this
project. I'm good friends with the winemaker (he's a member of our KC
Cellarmaster club) who supplied the blackberry syrup. He gave some general
guidelines on how he makes the wine and I was in his winery recently to see
his fermentation. I always have to change things when I make wine or beer
so I did some reading on Ben Rotter' site where he advocates 100% juice
wines instead of diluting fruit juice per Jack Keller's site. I hate hot
wines so I thought I would shoot for a 10% alcohol content. Then if I add
sugar to sweeten after fermentation the wine would probably end up around 9%
alcohol...sort of like a German wine.

The wine started fermenting at 10.2 brix, pH 3.05 and TA 1.90%. I'm using
Fermiblanc Arom yeast which is similar to Epernay 2. This yeast has
resulted in some very good white wines in my cellar with pronounced fruit
aromas.

Well, I chickend out. A TA of 1.9% just connot end up being drinkable. So,
I made up some 10.2 brix sugar syrup and diluted the fermenting wine to a
theoretical 1.4% TA. This is still way too high for the grape wines I
usually make. But, I know my winemaking friend is vinting his wine with an
acid content near this value...actually a bit higher. I'll let this one
ferment out as is, evaluate and then decide how to make blackberry in the
future. It's nice to be able to buy a little high quality, commercial
blackberry syrup for home winemaking experiments.

One point well taken...I'll use Lysozyme to block a ML fermentation and
retain the acid mix that's native to blackberries. Thanks for you comments.

Bill Frazier
Olathe, Kansas USA