Sparkling Blueberry wine

[Czaccary]

I would love to make a sparkling blueberry wine, has anybody gotten any history with this? Even without the sparking part how much blueberries would one need to make a 6 gallon batch? Can i use store bought? How much sugar/ water to add? Could i use bentonite during the primary ?
Thanks for taking the time to read this!

 

[Rice_Guy]

* you can use any blueberry; if fresh wash for spray, if frozen you can’t wash, also a canned vinters Harvest is available.
* blueberry is fairly acidic, possibly it is best to say really ripe fresh blueberry might need added acid. A lot of the industry is acidic.
* normal is five pounds of fruit per gallon
* making a carbonated is normally done by adding a priming sugar when bottling. If you wanted a transparent/ clean wine this would involve riddling which is an advanced technique. The factory method would normally carbonate like a soda.
* there are many threads on blueberry wine example:

I was wondering how do you normally decide how much water to add to the blueberries to give you an exact amount of liquid.

Example, if I plan on 4 gals of blueberry wine, 3 gal for carboy with an extra gal to use for top ups. I wanted to use 7lbs per gal of blueberries. If I crush 28 lbs of thawed blueberries, and place in fermentation bucket, not all the juices have been extracted. How do I know how much water to add to give me that 4 gals? Does that eventually just come with trial and error and taking good notes or is there a technical way to calculate it?

Seems if I just fill to 4 gals, When I pull my mesh bag with skins the volume would drop quite a bit. If I pull the berries out before to add water, I may add to much. So just wondering how the proper way to determine the addition of water.

Also would using a refractor be the correct way to measure the brix when you have a bunch of berries to determine how much sugar to add. Since the berry sugar has really not all been extracted, I am thinking I would get a few berries and crush them up and measure the brix from the berry and somehow calculate how much water I'm adding and then what I want it to be and come up with amount of sugar to add? Am I off base?

So I work on a small permaculture farm doing various tasks and have recently decided/got permission to take on winemaking as my side project.

They have done it before, just to play around and have a setup with a 50 gallon fermenter, a ton of 5 gallon carboys, and most of the materials. I'm gonna take an inventory this week and see what kind of yeast they have and stuff like that, but we currently have 500 lbs of frozen blueberries and a decent amount of blackberries that they need to clear the freezer space for.

My background is in biology and I've homebrewed a few 5 gallon batches of beer in an awful setup in a small apartment. I've been reading a lot and I think my best plan is to make a base 50 gallon batch, and then separate out some 5 gallon batches from that and try adding different amounts of sugar or more blueberries and seeing what we all like best.
Unfortunately I tend to like sweeter wines and my boss prefers very dry ones lol.

One specific question I have is whether the blueberries need to be "cooked" or not. Some recipes call for it, but is that basically just for pasteurization and if you use some campden tablets it can be skipped?

Here is the base recipe I have so far:

50 gallon base recipe

-150 lbs of frozen blueberries in a mesh bag
-water to get to 50 gallons
-50? campden tablets
-let sit for 48 hours
-sugar SG to starting point TBD (1.090?) (does sugar need to be added via a boiling water mixture or can I just dump it straight in and mix it well? Am I really looking at like 80-100+ lbs of sugar?)
-1/2 cup acid blend
-1/2 cup pectic enzyme
-5/8 cup yeast nutrient
-1/5 cup tannin
-stir well
-add yeast
-stir and punch cap daily during fermentation, approx 2-3 weeks, monitor airlock activity and SG
-when fermentation slows, remove bags of berries, squeeze bag to extract juices? some say yes, some say no b/c it can make it bitter
-rack wine into 5 gallon carboys, at least two times with 3-4 weeks between to clear, add campden tablets each time?

In the 5 gallon carboys is where I'll make different adjustments. I'll try adding more sugar to some, maybe honey to one, add more blueberries to some in different amounts, and we can also age them different amounts. And I know somewhat about stabilization and stuff down the line that will vary a little for each one, and they'll all be bottled. He also says they didn't add any additional sugar last time, and just used blueberries but that doesn't seem right. But 100 lbs also feels excessive (recipes say 2 or 3 lbs per gallon) but what do I know...

Am I missing anything major in that basic outline?