How to make Blackberry Wine
Aside from preserve, jam, and compote you can use blackberries to make a very tasty and slightly harsh wine with a color slightly resembling grape wine. Its recipe is as solid as a rock. In Serbia, this beverage is called “drunken blackberry”. They make it in almost every village and serve very cold or in glasses with ice.
All varieties of blackberry are good for home winemaking. Hence if you have them, defenitely try this Blackberry wine recipe!
You should pick only juicy fresh berries which grew in sunlight because wine from berries which mellowed in shadow turns out to be watery and not as fragrant. First, you thoroughly sort out the berries, remove tainted or moldy ones. Then wash the blackberries, put on a paper towel and let the water pour out. Only after this, the blackberries are ready for use.
Ingredients:
- Blackberries – 4.4 lb / 2 kg
- Water – 0.25 gal / 1 liter
- Sugar – 2.2 lb / 1 kg
- Wine Yeast
Usually, there are wild yeast’s on blackberries but since we are washing them, they are most likely will be washed out, and therefore we will need a wine yeast to start fermentation. Hence you can purchase this in advance, you can get wine yeast in our store.
Blackberry Wine recipe
- Crush the blackberries till smooth, and then put the squash into a non-metal container with a wide bottleneck.
- Add Wine Yeast, and 14 oz / 400 gr of sugar, stir it up.
- Leave the container in a dark place with a room temperature, tie up the bottleneck with gauze and leave it for 3-4 days. Once a day stir the must with clear hands or with a wooden spoon, knocking down “the hat” from pulp on the surface.
- If you see the signs of fermentation (sour smell, foaming and hissing), filter the juice through gauze, then pour it into a fermentation container (fill it up to 70% of its volume). Squeeze the pulp by hands and mix obtained liquid with the juice.
- Add 10.5 oz / 300 grams of sugar, stir it up. Install an airlock lock for wine, tightly seal all of the connections. Leave the container in a dark place with a temperature of 65-77F° / 18-25°C.
- After 4 days add remaining sugar (10.5 oz / 300 grams) to the must. Get some of the liquid out 0.5 qt / 500 ml and dissolve sugar in it. Then pour the syrup back into the must and install the airlock.
- After 35-45 days the fermentation will stop: the blackberry wine will get brighter, there will be a layer of sediment at the bottom, ab airlock will stop bubbling – these are signs that fermentation has stopped. It’s time to pour the new wine into another clean container through a narrow tube without touching the sediment at the bottom.
- Leave the tightly sealed container in a dark room with a temperature of 50-61F° / 10-16°C for 60-90 days of aging.
- Separate the blackberry wine from the sediment once again and bottle it. Then seal the bottles with corks. Store it in a fridge or a basement. Its shelf-life is 1-2 years.
You should get a delicious Homemade Blackberry wine!