Going. To. Scream.

Hey y'all. Been awhile since I've been here. I've done several wines successfully, but the very first one I put up for aging was a blueberry wine. I got it out today to bottle...and saw that the airlock had gone dry. The wine is sour so is unusable as wine. Blast. However it might make a quite nice salad vinegar...

My question is: what do I need to do to take my gallon of blueberry to finish it as a vinegar? I was thinking of filtering it into a primary and leaving it for a week to finish its oxidation. Is there a better way?

You could add some tablespoons of Braggs Apple Cider Vinegar (with the mother) to help get it going down the right path to vinegar, but time will be your friend here. It took many weeks to get vinegar from wine (6-8 weeks at least).

I've purposely turned wine to vinegar this way (Braggs) and is was delicious. I've also tasted wine naturally contaminated with acetobacter that tasted like acetone (mmmmm, finger nail polish remover <--not so good :yuck: ).

If it were me, I've give it a push down the right path so at least you get something usable.

Thanks. Found the Braggs at Kroger this evening. I've got several gallons to filter and bottle tomorrow, but once they're safely put to bed, I'll filter the blueberry, then add the Braggs and let it do its thing. Is it better to put it in a primary bucket and just let it do its thing or should I go ahead and put an airlock back on it and treat it as I would a wine in secondary?

I always left my inoculated red wine open to the air with a cloth cover, however I also partially covered the opening with plastic in hopes of keeping too much evaporation from happening. I never did such a large batch as you have; I was always working with about half a gallon at a time. I think the larger batch size might be a benefit.

Basically it worked like this: I'd put in about half gallon of red wine and 2-3 tablespoons of Braggs Cider Vinegar w/ Mother. I'd cover half of the crock with plastic wrap and, over the top of that, I'd cover with a flour sack (any fabric would work) and used a rubberband to keep it all in place. It would take a couple/few weeks for the first signs to happen which looks like an oil slick across the top of the wine. The oil slick kind of has that "oil/gas streaked on water" look to it (like you might see behind a motor boat on a lake). Some time after that (week/weeks) a gelatinous covering forms over the top and thickens with time (I've always heard this was the mother). After this forms, it's just a matter of carefully tasting it until it reaches the acidity you're after at which point I'd put it all in acid-proof containers for storage. It will form mothers in the containers but they are harmless (just don't want to eat them ).

Some google pics of mothers:

Lol!!!! When I tasted it, it tasted awful, but I hadn't yet filtered it. ( I filter all my wines since I have a nasty allergy to yeast.). At any rate, we got all the rest of the wines bottled and then opened the blueberry. I reminded my husband that it hadn't been filtered at all yet, so we ran it through a coarse and then a medium filter. Lo and behold...it was AWESOME!!!!!!!! Though I may make some blueberry vinegar...on purpose... Soon, THAT gallon is marked for the dinner table!!!!

Many thanks for the tips.