Homemade Blueberry Wine
Originally published September 5, 2013, Updated on 10/29/20
Blueberry wine is fantastic, and easy to make - whether a gallon or five gallons at a time! Homemade blueberry wine is worth the effort.
Last summer, we happened upon an AMAZING deal on fresh blueberries at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. As we looked at the cases upon cases of blueberries that were available at that ridiculous price, Porter and I had the exact same thought: We should buy a TON of these, and make wine!
We had made a batch of wine from frozen blueberries a few years ago, and that was amazing - fresh could only be better, right?
RIGHT!
We made something like 10 gallons of this, but I've pared our recipe to be done "by the gallon", so you can adjust for how many blueberries you have to work with.
No fresh blueberries? No problem, just substitute an equal weight of frozen blueberries! .
As is, this wine batch ran pretty dry at the end, so we sweetened it up with a bit of sugar at the end. We like our wine pretty sweet, though.
How to Make Blueberry Wine
If you haven't attempted making wine before, don't be intimidated! Check out our primer to home brewing:
- Wine Making At Home, Part 1: Why?
- Wine Making at Home, Part 2: Equipment to Get Started
- Wine Making at Home, Part 3: The Brewing Process.
- Wine Making at Home, Part 4: How to Stabilize and Back Sweeten Wine
Just a small handful of entries, and you'll be good to go!
Blueberry Wine Ingredients
This wine recipe requires only a few ingredients to make - super simple! Here is some information about those base ingredients that you may find helpful.
Blueberries
You can use fresh or frozen blueberries to make this wine. There are just a few differences in how to use them, and things to keep in mind:
Fresh Blueberries
When using fresh blueberries, be sure to use ripe berries, and pick through to remove anything that's not ripe, is moldy, etc.
I like to whirl the blueberries in the food processor to break them up a bit, and let them sit in the sugar for a couple hours before starting on the wine making, as it - maceration - draws the juices out of the berries... but this isn’t totally necessary.
Frozen Blueberries
When using frozen blueberries, you can skip the maceration process. Freezing and thawing blueberries breaks them down in a way that ends up with a result similar to maceration.
Sugar
While sugar is technically optional when making wine, NOT adding any sugar will result in an INCREDIBLY dry wine.
Sweet tooth aside, I find that pretty much any fermented fruit /fruit juice beverage (wine, mead, cider) just tastes better when there’s some degree of sweetness there. It really brings out the fruit flavour.
Type of Sugar
In terms of type of sugar, we prefer to use plain white granulated sugar for this blueberry wine. Sometimes we’ll use brown sugar for part of the sugar content to shake things up a bit - it gives it a richer flavour.
Feel free to use either type, raw cane sugar, or a mixture of any/all of these.
Alcohol Content
Aside from flavour, there’s the matter of alcohol content.
Your wine’s final ABV will vary wildly dependent on a few things: The initial sugar content of the berries you use, how much sugar you add, and what kind of yeast you use (more on that in a bit)
Any amount of sugar will result in a higher alcohol content. Sugar - both in the base wine itself, and from the added sugars - is what feeds the yeast, the yeast eats up the sugars and gives off alcohol as the byproduct of that process.
More sugar = more food = more alcohol... to a point, anyway. About that...
Yeast
The type of yeast you use will impact the alcohol content of the final product.
Yeast organisms don’t have an *unlimited* capacity to process sugar into alcohol. At some point, the environment they’re living in - the brewing wine - becomes too high in alcohol for the yeast to survive. They die off, the fermentation stops.
Different types of yeast have different tolerances for alcohol in the environment. That is, some yeast will be able to survive higher amounts of alcohol in the wine, so they’ll continue producing it longer than some other types.
Some types of yeast will bring you to something like an 8% ABV, while others will let things run wild until close to 20% ABV.
It’s good to know what you have in mind, when you choose your yeast.
If you want a sweet wine with a low-ish ABV - without having to back sweeten it (more on that in a bit) - choose a yeast with a lower tolerance for alcohol.
If you’re looking for a dry wine with a low ABV, choose a yeast with a lower tolerance for alcohol, and don’t use a ton of sugar.
If you want a sweet wine with a high ABV, use a bunch of sugar with a high-tolerance yeast... and be prepared to backsweeten it.
If you want a dry wine with a high ABV, use a fair amount of sugar and a high tolerance yeast.
Back Sweetening Your Homemade Blueberry Wine
Sometimes, you’ll find that the yeast went a bit too far with their smorgasbord, and you end up with a Blueberry wine that’s not as sweet as you’d like it.
... and that’s when you back sweeten it! You can read my How to Stabilize and Back Sweeten Wine post for information on how to back sweeten it.
More Home Brewing Recipes!
While you've got your current homebrew fermenting away, why not consider putting a batch of something else on, to occupy your wait time? Here are a few of my other wine, cider, and mead recipes:
Wine Recipes
Banana Wine Recipe
Blackberry Wine Recipe
Blackcurrant Wine Recipe
Cherry Wine Recipe
Cranberry Clementine Christmas Wine Recipe
Cranberry Wine Recipe
Faux Lingonberry Wine
Lychee Wine Recipe
Mango Strawberry Wine Recipe
Mango Wine Recipe
Mint Wine Recipe
Lychee Wine Recipe
Partridgeberry Wine Recipe
Passionfruit Wine Recipe
Peach Wine Recipe
Stone Fruit Wine Recipe
Strawberry Wine Recipe
Ube Wine Recipe
Watermelon Wine Recipe
Mead Recipes
Black Cherry Mead Recipe
Blueberry-Clementine Mead Recipe
Blueberry Mead Recipe
Clementine Mead Recipe
Pumpkin Mead Recipe
Wildflower Mead Recipe
Cider & Miscellaneous Homebrew Recipes
Hard Apple Cider Recipe
Home Brew Hard Iced Tea Recipe
Maple Hard Apple Cider Recipe
Share the Love!
Before you drink up, be sure to take some pics of your handiwork! If you Instagram it, be sure to tag me - @CelebrationGenerationCA - or post it to My Facebook Page - so I can cheer you on!
Also, be sure to subscribe to my free monthly email newsletter, so you never miss out on any of my nonsense.
Well, the published nonsense, anyway!
Anyway, on to that Blueberry Wine Recipe!
Homemade Blueberry Wine
Equipment
Ingredients
- 3-4 lbs fresh blueberries
- 2 lbs white sugar
- 1 gallon spring water will use slightly less
- ½ teaspoon acid blend
- ½ teaspoon pectic enzyme
- 1 teaspoon yeast nutrient
- ¼ teaspoon wine tannin
- 1 packet Red Star “Pasteur Red” yeast
- Wine stabilizer of choice optional
Instructions
- Rinse and pick through blueberries, removing any that are moldy, etc. Place in a large pot, along with the sugar. Using a potato masher or VERY clean hands, stir and mash blueberries. Allow to sit for an hour or so, if you'd like.
- Add water, stir well. Heat to ALMOST boiling, then simmer gently for 30 minutes. Stir in acid blend, enzyme, nutrient, and tannin.
- Pour mixture into a freshly sanitized fermenting bucket. Cover with sanitized lid and air lock, allow to cool to room temperature (overnight).
- The next morning, give the mixture a quick stir with a long, sanitized spoon, and – using sanitized equipment – take a gravity reading of the liquid (strain out any blueberries). Keep track of the number! (This is an optional step, but will allow you to calculate your final ABV %)
- Sprinkle yeast into fermenter, cover with sanitized cover and air lock. Within 48 hours, you should notice fermentation activity – bubbles in the airlock, carbonation and /or swirling in the wine must. This means you’re good to go!
- After a week or so, use your sanitized siphon setup to rack the must into a freshly sanitized carboy. Put the carboy somewhere cool (not cold!), and leave it alone for a month or so.
- Using sanitized equipment, rack the blueberry wine off the sediment, into a clean, freshly sanitized carboy. Cap with sanitized airlock, leave it alone for another 2-3 months.
- Rack one more time, leave it for another 3 months or so.
- When your wine has been racked a few times and shows NO more fermenting activity for a month or so (no bubbles in the airlock, no more sediment being produced, you can move on to bottling.
- Follow the instructions on your selected type of wine stabilizer to stop fermentation. For potassium sorbate, this needs to be done 2-3 days before bottling.
- Using sanitized equipment, take a gravity reading, then rack the wine into clean, sanitized bottles. Cork.
dustin
made th blueberry wine recipe....very easy and very good...thanks for the help! ou habe some great recipes here. best of luck
Chip
We began this recipe about 2 weeks ago. Racked it today into 2 1/2 gallon growlers (it's what we had on hand) and just for kicks, I took a gravity reading. It's already at a 13.5%! We may have sampled what was in the test jar, and can I say, WOW. If it's this good after 2 weeks, I can't imagine how heavenly it will be in a few months. Thanks for the recipe. We used blueberry's we picked along the creek on our property. We like it so much, we went and picked another 6.5 lbs today. They're in the freezer waiting to be made into wine.
Keith
We Made this recipe and it turned out very good, it was simple and easy...
We then tweeked the recipe on the next 3 batches we did which were 10 gallon batches...
We used 5 Lbs of Rabbit eye blueberrys and 3 Lbs sugar per gallon of spring water....
We used a 30 gallon American Oak Barrel to store the wine for 6 months, the barrel was previously used to store bourbon whiskey.
After Fermentation was finished we then filtered the wine and then ran it through our copper pot still and produced 3 gallons of 100 proof blueberry brandy. it was absolutely wonderful flavor, the bourbon whiskey barrel added so much to the taste of the wine, then when distilled it was intensified.
Our next experiment will be to use a pouch and steep some coco into the wine while its heating and see if we can create a blueberry brandy with hints of chocolate....
Roy cook
If I wanted 5 gallons would it still be one packet of yeast?
Marie Porter
Supposed to be, yes - I tend to like to toss a second one in as "insurance", though.
Arielle
I have a blueberry port in the making. Probably one more racking and then it will be ready for bottling.
Bruce
Were can I buy pectin enzyme
Jay
Any wine making supply store or amazon.
CAROLYN
CAN A SIMPLE WINE BE MADE WITH JUST BERRIES, SUGAR & YEAST?
Marie Porter
Sure, but you'd want some water in there too.
fred
Hi I have made your banana wine loved it . But i made about 15 gallons or so,I than took the last 5 gallons and made brandy !Whoo hoo turned out to be about 60% alc. I took it to a friends house they had a few people there they were all surprised . it was sangria time . had a good time but that bottle was empty.all came bu my house to see if there was any more. I though I would tell this story thanks for web site your new friend fred ' if you would like me to let you how to do this I would be happy to .NO DISTILLING
Tabba Crae
HEllo Fred!!
I'd love to have your recipe for the banana brandy!
Thanks in advance!
TC
Roberta Long
I was wondering why other recipes state that one packet of yeast will make 5 gallons and this calls for 5? I’m new at this.
Marie Porter
I'm confused, this recipe is for 1 gallon and calls for 1 packet of yeast. Where are you seeing 5?
Marie Porter
Oh wait, are you using the tool to convert?
That software just does the math in multiplying ingredients for bigger batches, it's not "smart" enough to know about yeast.
1 packet works for up to 5 gallons. If you do a bigger batch, I like to go 1 packet per every 5 gallons.
Erin Fontaine
If making 5 gallons should I just multiply all ingredients by 5?
Marie Porter
Yes, except for the yeast - 1 packet is good for up to 5 gallons.