We got another batch of wine going last night. We’ve got apple, pumpkin and blood orange all going in the basement, and the blood orange is just about ready to bottle (we’ll probably do that on Sunday), so we were talking about what we might want to do for our next batch. Last Saturday someone (I forget who) had mentioned that blueberries were on sale at Kroger… So on Monday I checked and found a recipe in the Winemaker’s Companion for blueberry wine.
Last night we went grocery shopping for party stuff. And, since we were near North Campus, we decided to hit Kroger and check out the blueberry sale. The berries were in pretty good shape, but there was no indication of how long the sale would last, and no sign that they would be getting new stock. If we waited until next week, chances were good that the berries would either be mush or the sale would be over. So we decided to buy the ingredients and make a batch.
We got seven five pound boxes of berries, two pounds of raisins, fifteen pounds of sugar and then zipped over to Merchant of Vino for a new five gallon carboy, stopper, water lock, and a bag of corks for when we bottle the blood orange wine. I did a quick calculation and figured that five gallons of wine would fill just about thirty standard (750ml) wine bottles.
We headed home and I got the dishes done and the equipment sanitized while my Fiancee did the lawn. (Just a quick digression about that. She mowed a heck of a lot more that I was expecting and she did an AWESOME job! The backyard had gotten really quite shaggy and now it looks much more civilized… Thanks babe!) She came back in and did some baking while I was doing the grunt work of sorting through berries, removing the occasional stem and tossing out a few mushy rejects before feeding them into the blender and pouring the goo into the new carboy.
The thing about baking is that once you’ve put the stuff in the oven you’ve got time to sit back and read for a bit. The nearest book happened to be the Winemaker’s Companion, so my Fiancee started looking through that while I did the whole wash-destem-sort-blend-pour-repeat loop. When she got to the chapter on fruit wines, she kind of paused and asked, “What recipe are you using?”
“The one for the blueberry wine. Thirty five pounds of blueberries, two pounds of raisins, 11 pounds of sugar…”
“I don’t see any raisins in the recipe.”
“It should be right after the blueberry.”
“Yeah… There’s no raisins. Also, it says fifteen pounds of blueberries. Not thirty five.”
A little more investigation revealed that I was following the recipe for blackberry wine, only with blueberries… One of these days, I’m going to learn to double-check what I’m reading. Until then, I’ll just have to improvise and hope.