Grape style blackberry ideas/oaking

[greyday]

I've read through several blackberry threads and recipes but I'm not finding what I'm looking for. I'd basically like to do a non-country style blackberry wine (I.e., ferment only the juice i can pull from the blackberries, no added water or sugar). So a couple of opinion/info questions:

Should I approach the entire process like I would a grape wine? Ferment on skins, oak ageing, etc? Anything I should look out for/be wary of?

I plan to use a steam juicer as I've read you get a higher volume of juice, and I'm looking for a lot (obviously). Anyone have thoughts RE: steam juicer vs press?

If steam juicing, is freezing the fruit first still necessary to help with the process?

Anyone have a rough idea how much fruit I'll need? Judging by other threads, I'm assuming around 50# or so, planning to take two 8gallon buckets to a upick and fill both...

For oak aging--if I do so, my plan is to pick up a medium char 5 gallon barrel to use, then reuse for a bourbon, then long term for a scotch style whisky (I have a friend who owns a distillery, have talked with him about buying straight distillations from him). I have read that the ratio of time for the 5 gallon barrels is roughly 40% (5 months in 5gal=1 year in traditional barrel). How long should I age? I know "to taste", but I'm more curious how long I should leave it alone to just sit before taking a first taste? I know most recipes call for spirals or chips to sit for 3-6 months, so would that be like 1.5-3 months?

Thanks, all!

 

[saramc]

Unless your blackberries are super sweet you are going to have a lower alcohol wine, just be aware of that. The average blackberry has a SG of 1.021-1.039, keyword average. You can definitely do an all steam-juiced blackberry wine but you need to be able to manage the pH and TA of this must. There are a few threads, recent even, where this is discussed specific to blackberry. You will need a digital pH probe and a TA test kit, plus assorted acid reduction additives deciding on how you plan to deal with it. Then you have to decide if you want to address preferment vs postferment. As far as juice yield, now it can/will vary, but you can expect to get 2-3 cups of juice for each quart of berries when you steam juice. No reason to add the pulp back, ie use the skins, because they will be filled with steam/water as the juice leaves the cells. You can freeze/thaw add pectinase and then process via steam juicer, or not. I did a comparison using raspberries a while back and had a 5% increase on yield when I froze/thawed/pectinased the fruit for 12 hours and then steam juiced, compared to fresh/pectinase for 12 hours and then steam juiced.