First time wine making

I've successfully made a few gallon batches of hard cider and now I want to start making my own wine. I'm thinking of trying to make blueberry wine. I'm assuming I can just take the juice add sugar, yeast nutrient and yeast to it. I'm looking to that is semi sweet, but not too sweet and be between 7%-10%. Does anyone have any good recipes or yeast retrogradations for blueberry wine? I want this to be very simple and ferment quickly. Thanks!

r6543 said:

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I want this to be very simple and ferment quickly. Thanks!

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Wine making is neither "very simple" nor "quick". Expect a chemistry class and a year wait.

Here is a recipe, but it does not have any of the tips and tricks that you will learn over time. http://www.squidoo.com/blueberry-wine-recipe

You can get some decent recipes from Terry Gary's book http://www.amazon.com/dp/0380782278/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20
or from Jack Keller's website: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/recipe3.asp
There is also the recipe section here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f79/
Also, you can often just swap out 1 berry for another in a recipe with good results, but not always. It worked out well enough for me when I swapped blueberries for black berries in a recipe. Hope that helps, GF.

Winemaking is not hard, but it requires some patience!


There are some basic winemaking things that you don't see in a recipe. But they are even more important than a recipe. One is sanitation- everything that touches the must must be sanitized with a food-grade sanitizer. The other important thing to remember is to avoid oxidation after fermentation has started. That means always "quietly" siphoning the wine to new containers (racking) when you have sediment on the bottom, keeping it "topped up" to within an inch or two of the bung, and keep it covered to protect it from light.

Here's some great basic info: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/basics.asp

The yeast will ferment the wine to dryness. There just aren't any of those long chain maltodextrins that they leave behind in fruit juice. So, a 7-10% wine is one that starts around 1.060-1.075. Find a quality source of juice, measure the SG of that, then figure out how much sugar to add to get you into the range you want.

Now, adding the sugar back at then end is something I haven't tried yet and information on how to do it successfully is sketchy. But, you have months before you have to worry about that ;-)

Good luck!

You want fruit wine at 10-15%. 12% is a good target. (To be foodsafe)
Ferment completely dry and clear, then back sweeten.
I make simple syrup in 10lb batches of sugar. Using about a gallon of water and 1/4 teaspoon of kmeta. (It will be diluted as I back sweeten.)

Then the trick is to add it about 8 oz at a time until you get the sweatness you desire.

if you are back sweetening without adding sorbate you will risk having the sugar that you add ferment, resulting in a sparkling wine at first, bottle bombs ultimately.