With nighttime temperatures in the teens and daytime temperatures struggling to reach thirty, I thought it might take awhile for the blueberries we crushed last week to ferment. Not so. The must went from 16 brix to zero in two days. Dave added more sugar and raised the brix level to eight. When we pressed it over the weekend it was back to zero. I assume that if the original measure was 16 and that was fermented to zero, then increased to eight the total brix would be around 24. That should give us a dry wine around 13+ alcohol. Let me know if my math is off.
Pressing started off rather typical. We used stainless steel buckets to transfer the must from the fermentor to the crusher. The volumne of the must was around 400 liters. Dave didn’t have a spare stainless steel tank, so we placed the wine in four 15-gallon demijohns. The first couple of demijohns were free run juice. A taste indicated that the wine was tart with a blueberry taste and aroma. That tartness will be addressed later. We had no problem filling the other two demijohns and began to fill a 2.5-gallon carboy for topping off. We needed another quart of wine and after inspecting the pumice and noting it was still rather moist, it was decided to press again.
During the original press, there were a few leaks as wine shot out from the press in a few spots. Brian came up with an idea of placing plastic bags around the outside of the press. This caught the wine and allowed it to flow to the bottom of the press. The plastic bags worked quite well until . . .
We were filling the carboy when there was a pop and then a shower of blueberry pumice hit Rob and me as well as the sidewall and a bit of the ceiling. The blow out is an example of why one does not wear their Sunday best clothes to a winery to work. Rob definitely had the worst of the splatter. I on the other hand had to be at church in twenty minutes and decided that it would be a good idea to get cleaned up. Besides, even though I wore a hat, some of the pumice and wine managed to make its way to my hair and down my neck.
Dave said it was only about the fourth time in two years that the press had a blowout. I’m sure we will find some humor in this. I did get cleaned up and clothes were washed. My Detroit Tiger hat, although covered in blueberries, cleaned up well. In fact it is cleaner now than it had been in several years. I have already heard comments from my children such as, “You need to wear a hazmat suit when pressing.” Another comment I expect to hear frequently is, “Making blueberry wine is a blast.”
Leave a Reply