Blueberries!

It doesn’t really look like it, but there’s 5 gallons of blueberries in the freezer.  I’m looking forward to turning them into wine this fall.  We have an old 1850’s farmhouse with no air conditioning.  This leaves us no control over the temperature and we usually end up with a too vigorous fermentation due to a higher temperature.    If a wine ferments at fluctuating or inconsistent temperature it can change the chemical makeup of the wine.   I’ve finally learned to wait until the cooler months to start fermenting.  Three years ago I made a beautiful blueberry wine.  I made it like a red wine.   I adjusted the sugar to give it 14% alcohol content, added tannin and citric acid.  After the primary fermentation I ran it through the malolactic fermentation, chilled proofed and stuck it on oak chips for about three weeks; I bottled it up right away.  It turned out like a cabernet.  Really, it did.   It was way bigger than I thought you get out of blueberries.  The oak chips provided a nice vanilla note and mellowed the wine out, the added tannin and acid balanced out the sugar, and the flavor was not like blueberry at all.  If you blind tested me with this wine, I would have never have guessed.   Well this was in the middle of a hot VA summer and sometime around late August the wine started to re-ferment in the bottle and we had a couple of bottles shoot their corks off in the rack.  This did not bode well for the longevity of this wine.  Even after sticking a few bottles in the wine fridge, it was never really the same. 

There are a few mistakes that I made with this wine.  1) I did not add enough potassium sorbet before bottling.  I had a previous batch where I added a bit too much and it turned out with a rotten egg smell.  I was a little too cautious from the last burn.  2) I probably should have continued to bulk age it in the fridge.  Since then, I’ve been bulk aging my wines for at least 6 months.  3) Of course waiting until the fall when the air cools off.  We’re planning on building a garage with environmental controls where I can have a space to create wine.  Until then, I can’t wait to pull these berries out of the freezer in a couple of months!