Blackberry Wine from Down-under
Submitted by: Adrian van Leest
Ingredients
Recently I received a note from a fellow wine maker from Australia and was intrigued by his note as posted in it's entirety below. This is not tested by myself so I have nothing to go on but his posting. But I can say I have made many of times a 100% fruit batch, some to my liking and some over-powering. You be your own judge.....
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am intrigued by the various blackberry wine recipes all using copious volumes of water, diluting the blackberry to perhaps a mere hint of fruit. As I live in Australia, I have grown accustomed to full-on reds, like the deep, dark Australian shiraz wines that I am sure you have tasted and enjoyed. So I figured that if I were to try to simulate a powerful red wine with blackberries, it would need to be made out of nothing but blackberries – dense, black and full of flavor, with real aging potential. I now have over 100 bottles made over the past 5 years, with the older ones tasting increasingly more magnificent as the bitter tannins dissipate and the fruit wins out in its marriage to a goodly level of alcohol.
My recipe is basically as follows:
Wash and then crush 7 kilos of berries
Add 1 kilo of sugar, 1 teaspoon of pectinate, 10 grams of ascorbic acid and 2 crushed/dissolved campden tablets
Place the lot in a sterile container (waste bins are good) and let stand for 24 hours to allow to sterilize
Activate red wine yeast in a solution of a large spoonful of sugar and sterile water, and place the activated yeast in the crushed fruit when the 24 hours have elapsed
Allow open fermentation for four-five days to extract tannins and color from skins, and some bite from the pips
Make sure to stir the fermenting fruit twice daily to ensure fermentation of and extraction from skins
Filter the crushed fruit through a strong cotton cloth and place filtered fermenting juice in demijohn (sealed with a rubber plug and airlock)
Allow to ferment further for three weeks
Rack the fermented wine off lees and rebottle in cleaned demijohn (sealed again with rubber plug and airlock) for another 5-6 weeks (top up with red wine if need be, not water)
Further racking may be necessary depending of the clarity of the wine
Bottle the wine and seal with good quality cork (makes 6 bottles per gallon)
Aging does wonders for this product which will be quite bitter at first, but the aging tannins mellow and the deep blackberry fruit wins the day after about four-five years.
Unfortunately, you need a lot of blackberries to make this extraordinary black elixir.
Best wishes from down-under.
