So, firstly, I should tell you that we have molto molto blackberries here. Both local and invasive types busy taking over our land! So we planned to pick a lot of the blackberries this year (slows down the seed from spreading if we eat them!). The deer of course help eat the blackberries too – but I think when they come out the other end they're merely spreading the seeds around for us…
So, one rather fabulous way of using the blackberries is to make wine. We've made stacks of jam already…
Step 1 is of course to buy the wine kit – which we finally did yesterday evening! And by wine kit I simply mean the equipment – which cost a measly $60 (minus the 10% discount for shopping on Tuesdays) so that's $54…
Now what's fun is that the recipe we have is for 4lbs of Blackberries (which we have ready to go) and makes 1 gallon of wine. But the equipment we have makes 5 gallons of wine!!! Which means we need 20lbs of blackberries… We'd best get picking!
Of course the most disappointing thing is that once we've made it – blackberry wine needs to mature for at least a year - so it won't be ready in time for this Christmas as we had hoped.
5 gallons of wine = 40 pints. 40 x 568ml (in a pint) = 22720ml = 22.72 litres of wine = 30 bottles of blackberry wine! Joy. That should help with our alcohol budget for a while…
I'll let you know how the wine-making goes…