BLUEBERRY WINE

[Duster]

It's at .994 and has stopped there. I'm going to have a bench trial and try sweetening with my homemade blueberry syrup. It's made with corn syrup, so it shouldn't do anything to start a re-ferment. I'm also going to check the TA and see what's up there. *sigh*

I believe corn syrup will restart fermentation. I could be wrong, I have never tried it but I would think it should be the same as dextrose.
A little K-meta and Sorbate will help stop this.

 

[SBWs]

RAYWAY like others have said you need to stabilize (K-meta & Sorbate) before backsweetening.

This is the way someone explained fruit wines to me. Pies are sweet, you wouldn't make a pie without using sugar to sweeten it. So if you want your wine to taste like pie you will need to sweeten it. Now that's taking it a bit far, but most fruit wines do need some sweetening to bring out the flavor. Some more so than others, blackberry, and elderberry are two I can think of that can be good on the dryer side. The corn syrup should help bring out the flavor and might even add some body. Looks like you are on the right path.

 

[the_rayway]

Thank you all for the responses! This explanation of sweet to bring out the fruit makes a lot of sense (aha!).

So, sulphite and sorbate, then bench trials with several different sweeteners/strengths. Thank you all so much for the comments and help! Will keep you posted on how it turns out.

 

[the_rayway]

I've now played with my blueberries a little bit, and still very disappointing. I've added all of the blueberry syrup I made this summer and it barely made a dent. I keep thinking that it tastes like 'barf' just like the juice I picked up. I've tried bench sweetening several different ways and all kinds of strengths and it never tastes good!

I tested the TA and it came to a measly .20%, so this evening I added 4 tsp acid blend to bring it up to .60% it helped a little bit...and it took the little sugar addition better than it has. Do people generally add more acid to blueberry than 'normal'? I know that you never make blueberry pie without lemon juice.

Oooh, how frustrating!

 

[dcteague]

I recently did a blueberry wine recipe I developed as the basis for a port. It was primarily concentrates that included both fig and blueberry, but mainly blueberry. Throughout the process, it tasted horrible. I had fermented down to 1.0 and had added additional blueberry to prolong fermentation, and then raise the alcohol so I could avoid diluting my wine with too much alcohol. Finally today, I added a bit of black cherry juice to finish off the fermentation process before I fortify. For whatever reason, the blackcherry juice made this just taste surprisingly good even though its not even 2 weeks into the process. Not sure what you've tried to back sweeten your wine with, but you may want to try black cherry - I picked this up from other recipes and I can now see why it is recommended.

Of course, I'm on my first wine (not my first time brewing though), so please take my comments with caution - my port could be diesel fuel soon