Blackberry Flavor

yeastluvr · Dec 18, 2009

I started a 5 gallon batch of blackberry wine in August. I'm planning on bottling after one more racking in the next couple months. I made a fairly heavy bodied wine with around 25 pounds of blackberries, however, I'm not getting that blackberry flavor I was looking for. Tastes more like a traditional red wine then I thought it would. I know there are extracts out there and I've tried a sample of the wine using them but wasn't impressed with the flavor they gave.

Is there anything else people are using to give their fruit wines more of the fruit flavor other then extracts?

flyweed · Dec 18, 2009

Blackberry is just a very hard flavor to really get pronounced. It is such a light, mellow and not sweet flavor it gets hidden easily. I made a Blackberry Blonde ale recently, that I used an entire 4oz bottle of blackberry extract, plus a large can of Oregon Blackberry puree, and you can taste the blackberry, but it still isn't overly pronounced..it is very subtle.

Dan

BrewStooge · Dec 18, 2009

That's about the result we got here with a blackberry wine as well. Some seem to just keep more of the flavor than others. As to how to fix it, I'd say either stopping it short leaving it more a sweet wine, or stabilizing it after it's finished and then adding some plain juice of the fruit if you wanted to avoid extract.

ByCandleLightWinery · Dec 20, 2009

Kind of funny that when you drink a glass of wine that you don't stop and say, "It doesn't taste like grapes." Yet we expect fruit wines and ciders to taste like their source.

That said, the one blackberry wine I've had was fermented dry, and the owner said drink it like a Merlot, which he was right about.

Wish I had better advice...

summersolstice · Dec 21, 2009

You can try adding several pounds of blackberries in the secondary and, as one poster suggested, backsweeten a bit. The most flavorful commercial blackberry wines are sweet.