I am interested in blending a fruit wine with blackberries, blueberries and Concord grapes. Can you give me any input on a formula to use for 5 or 6 gallons. I’ve been ordering from Kraus for over 6 years and have had a lot of fun. Thank you for your input.
Name: Guy K.
State: PA
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Hello Guy,
This is a question we get from time to time, and one I don’t mind answering again because it’s such a fun subject. A big part of the enjoyment of making your own wine is the ability to experiment and play around a little bit.
Guy, there are two ways you can go about making blended fruit wines:
- The first is to make all the fruits into wines, separately. Then blend them together before bottling.
- The second way is to find a wine recipes for each of the fruits you want to blend. Then combine them together into one recipe that includes all the different fruits.
Making each fruit into a wine separately has some disadvantages. It’s more work. It’s a lot easier to make on 5 or 6 gallon batch than making three 2 gallon batches. You would be making three odd-sized batches. Not many home wine makers have the fermenters that are the right size for these smaller-sized batches.
But blending fruit wines together after they have been made separately has one big advantage. You can blend the three wines together in any ratio you like. This will allow you to optimize your wine’s flavor. You can decide at bottling time how much of each individual wine to use. A series of taste-testings can help in this respect. You may decide on a ratio of 20-50-30 instead of 33-33-33.
Making all three fruits together as one batch is a lot less work, but you are stuck with the ratio of fruit you used when starting your wine. Your wine will turn out either way, you’ll just have less control of the final product.
To make all three fruits together you need to have a wine recipe for each fruit. In your case, you need a blackberry wine recipe; a blueberry wine recipe; and a Concord wine recipe. Most of the wine recipes you’ll run across will be for 5 gallons. You could throw everything called for into one big fermenter and make a 15 gallon batch. Or, you could use one third of each wine recipe to make a 5 gallon recipe.
Cutting the batches down in size is a fairly straight-forward thing to accomplish. If you have three 5 gallon wine recipes, just use 1/3 of each ingredient called for in each of the three wine recipe to make a new 5 gallon wine recipe. It’s as simple as that.
If more than one type of wine yeast is recommend among the three wine recipes, just pick one and go with it. Do not try blending wine yeast.
Regardless of which method you choose for blending fruit wines, the most important thing is to have fun. Having blind taste-testings with friends to help you figure out your blending ratio can be a blast. Or, come up with your own exotic blend of fruits that makes a punch of a wine — one you call your own. Either way making blended fruit wines is a blast.
Happy Winemaking,
Ed Kraus
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Ed Kraus is a 3rd generation home brewer/winemaker and has been an owner of E. C. Kraus since 1999. He has been helping individuals make better wine and beer for over 25 years.
I make a lot of mixed fruit wines here in the Philippines. I like using a wild plum they have here, and have great wines mixing it with, generally two other fruits. It’s a good idea to select the other fruits so that you have a good mix of citric, malic and tannic acids. Mango and plum work well and then you can add a little citrus fruit or juice. My recipes are all nearly the same, I vary the sugar slightly, depending on the sweetness of the fruit.
I too have been making and blending fruits into wine for 10 years now. I have created over 40 different combinations. Granted, some I didn’t care for like the peach/pear and the ones with watermelon in them. Although my favorites are red/black raspberry, my blueberry/pomagrate/cherry and my 12 fruit combo special. (Won a 3rd place ribbon with over 100 entries at a judging contest with it.). As soon as I think of something new, I try it. I make my own recipes with the method metioned above of using partials of each to make 5 gallon. When bottling I leave some dry, semi-sweeten some and make sweet with the rest. Most of my “consumers” like the semi-sweet.
Thanks for all your answers, Ed!
started making wine about 8 yrs ago with strictly fruit and mainly assorted berries, a result of having hundreds of pounds of them growing on my property every year and hated to see them become bird and critter food lol. to this day have won several medals at state fairs and never used a grape!! create and enter contests as a means of acquiring critiques from the experts and that way you learn if you ARE doing things correctly! biggest thing i learned thus far was how critical the quality of the water you use needs to be!
Hello Friends,
Just would like to add comments from my own experience to make fruit wines .
I live in the Caribbean where we have fruits more than any other part of Northern America as you guess. And I like to mix those fruits to make wines what French named as “coupage”.
You can mix fruits at the very beginning, before fermentation, just follow the rule: they must be all yellow, or all red, same family. You can blend them after fermentation is over, following the same rule. I am not using yeast and sulfites, my wines are the best after 6-12 months of aging, because the fruit is alive and wine continues to collect incredible texture while aging in the dark and cool place. Instead of yeast I am adding banana, it makes fermentation active. I am adding sugar in 3 steps, to make wine with maximum 11-15 percent of alcohol without losing taste of fruits. In some wines I am adding Caribbean rum and doing this I discovered my own Porto wine, very delicious and strong sweet wine. Hope my experience will help to some of your readers. Thank you and keep writing, your site is good
Walter
Sounds delicious. Thanks for sharing!
I want to try blending different fruits. Can you suggest which fruits blends well?
Martha, we really do not have a guide as to which fruit wines go well together. However here are a couple of combinations that we have enjoyed. Something we like is Elderberry/Banana and Cherry and Raspberry/Apple wines.
Is your Elderberry/banana wine dry, semi sweet or sweet? What would you say is the ratio of each fruit in one bottle?
I make your concentrated grape wines and would like to blend 60% Merlot & 40% Cabernet (a ratio from an Italian wine I have had).
Would it be better to mix the concentrates before fermentation to be able to reduce the exposure to air?
Thomas Jones, Ohio
Thomas, actually when blending wines we recommend making separate batches and blending the wine after fermentation. Doing it this way, you have better control over the finished product. I would take a look at the article posted below for more information on blending wines.
Blending Wine
http://eckraus.com/blending-to-improve-homemade-wines/
I live in Grenada, West Indies and have a startup business making exotic tropical fruit wines. Have been experimenting over two years now with a seemingly unlimited variety of local fruits. Some are mango, passion fruit, golden apple, starfruit, Grenada plum, Grenada cherry, rock fig and many others. One real popular one is sorrel which is actually a red flower.
Hope to do international sales someday. Having a lot of fun earning in the meantime.
Stan
D’ Grenada Fine Wine Company
Would you share your recipe, please?
I like sour cherries ((Montmorecy) Rhubarb and Raspberry combination. Also have used honey and brown sugar to sweeten which adds outstanding flavor, in my opinion. I also like to mix sour cherries and chokecherries. Chokecherries make a beautiful dark colored wine. Just have fun.
Can anyone suggest a favorite fruit combination recipe? I have blackberries, sour cherries, fuji and honey crisp apples, peaches and italian prunes. I’m thinking the cherries with apple to balance acidity, and then almost any other combo with the apple except peach, not sure what to combine peach with. Thanks
I am a newbie at wine making. On my 3rd year. But I love to combine pear and plum. It’s an amazing combo
I would like to make wine with pears and apples. I have read that also adding raisins helps with flavor is this true. Your insight would be great help.
Thank you
Some wines can be improved with chopped raisins. They will add some body to the wine, however it is not normally added to lighter colored wines because the raisins will add an oxidized or caramel color to the wine. Some winemakers do not like this appearance, but if you are okay with it, there will be some richness added to the wine.
I am here in Somerset, WI which is just across the St. Croix River from Stillwater, MN. This Spring I upgraded my small grape field, removing some difficult-to-grow grapes (about 5 0 of them) and replacing them to mainly Frontenac (reds…and a good red wine). I had a limited amount of these red grapes, along with raspberries, apples, and cranberries…thus, enough for a blend only, maybe 10 gallons or less.
These are “odd-bedfellows” but they will make wine…(Frontenac is a good heavy bodied red wine, raspberries are just that, raspberries. , cranberries are a good “pucker-Upper”, and apples are good but hard to clear.
Any suggestions?
George