My goodness me I never knew that making Blackberry wine was so complicated.
Mind you I have only been doing it for the lat 30 years, off and on.

I don't think that I have drastically altered the recipe I got from a
paperback book by H E Bravery goodness knows when!

I use 5 lbs of fruit/gal (imp) --- 4 blackberry and 1 elderberry. I adjust
the OG to about 1.085 and ferment with a Bordeaux style yeast and ferment
out to dry.
I bulk mature it for 2 years and these days I make it about every 2 years.

If you must insist in having it sweet, then I believe that the best way of
doing it, without affecting the wine in the long term is to drop a sweetener
or two just before serving. Most "sweeter wine" drinkers would not know any
difference. Sugar/Sweeteners hid a multitude of sins!

I would not begin to criticise those who drink sweet wines but most people,
as they accustom to drinking better wines, also find their tastes developed
to drier wines where one can actually taste the nuances of the wine ( both
good and bad!).

It will be obvious that I am not a sweet wine drinker -- I do enjoy
assessing the wines I make and drink ( and those I buy and drink) and
storing the "rating" up there in my noodle.

I have many happy memories associated with all sorts of wines from a very
young age. Many old ones distorted by time and age --- as are all early and
happy memories.

I will stop. I am rabbiting as usual on one of my favourite subjects

--
Trevor A Panther
In South Yorkshire, England
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"William Frazier" wrote in message
news

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