Making Blackberry Port (Fortified Wine)

if you've ever wondered what makes the best of all of the country wines it's this one blackberry rich sumptuous velvety fruity but we're not gonna make blackberry wine today we're gonna make blackberry port [Music] hello and welcome to english country life welcome to the kitchen welcome to making blackberry port blackberry pour is incredible it does need a little bit of care and attention it's not a super simple recipe we're gonna explore some techniques that i haven't used in some of the other countrywide videos we've made and it is a real port now what do i mean by port well let's not get into a history lesson but wines made in portugal some wines were too delicate they didn't survive transportation well but what people found was if they fortified those ones they added brandy to them if they raised the alcohol level to around 20 they transported brilliantly and they tasted fantastic and that's what port is it's a fortified one and today we're going to be making a fortified wine we're also going to use some quite particular yeasts we're going to use some techniques like back sweetening and stabilizing wine but the end result is worth it none of this stuff is complicated but it does need a proper step-by-step approach to do well with the end result trust me when you serve your friends or keep it for yourself for christmas is absolutely absolutely worth it okay so don't make notes through this video as i say we will be showing some techniques etc but what i'm gonna do is give a downloadable ingredients list and a step-by-step technique guide on our website you can find that link in the description below so just watch familiarize yourself and have a go i promise you it's worth it [Music] in order to get going we need one of these a fermenting bucket what we're going to do is sterilize it first very simple very cheap just put a good glug a plain unscented household bleach into it egg cap full 50 ml something like that fill it with water leave it for 15 minutes rinse it out twice [Music] that's our fermenting vessel posh word for a lidded white plastic bucket that's it sterilized next job is to get our juice out of our fruit into that bucket so let me show you our fruit you may notice it's in vacuum packed packets many many vacuum pack packets that's because we're making this wine with last year's fruit right now the other side of the door behind you fiona is defrosting one of our chest freezers and in order to do that we wanted to take out some of the stuff that's been there for a while and last year's autumn fruit is one of those things now i want you to notice inside this vacuum pack bag how much juice is running around and that answers a question we get asked a lot can i make this kind of wine from frozen fruit yes it's brilliant right in fact there's a lot to be said for freezing your own fruit or foraged fruit before making wine it breaks down a lot of the structures of the fruit and lets the juice run freely and it does no harm to the flavor at all so i've got four kilos of fruit to make one gallon of wine you need a lot of fruit to make this so blackberries are ideal if you've got good blackberry patch near you you can pick them i wouldn't want to buy the fruit for this or if like us you grow a lot of your own fruits good way of using up excess at this time of year so we're going to get on we're going to add this now i need to tell you i don't have four kilos of black bruce we've had a look i've got two kilos left but i've got two kilos of black currants too and i'm gonna make this recipe with a mix of both fruits and that's fine that's one of the joys of country wine you don't have to stick rigidly to a recipe i've made this recipe with all blackcurrants and with all blackberries and both are absolutely gorgeous but what i've got now is half and half i think that'll work well you'll get mellow blackberry notes you'll get light zingy black currant notes i think it'll be fantastic so i'm going to show you next how we strain the juice off how we get the juice out of this fruit into the bucket here's our sterile fermenting vessel and here is a large fine mesh nylon bag i'm gonna put that into the bucket and i'm going to put the fruit into the bag then when i want to get rid of the pulp and just have liquid i can just lift out the bag and let it drip all the blackberries in two kilos of them now the black currants look at the color of those aren't they beautiful it's going to give a real depth to the color and taste of the wine that's our defrosted fruit in nylon straining bag in a big sterile bucket that's all we've done so far now this first day we don't want to start fermentation all we're trying to do today is get that juice out of the fruit and also to kill off any wild yeast which may seem counterintuitive but wild yeast generally don't ferment out to a very high alcohol and this is a very high alcohol wine so what we're going to do to get the juice out we're going to add a teaspoon of citric acid and a kilo of white granulated sugar to our fruit and then i'm going to mash them all together with a potato masher and on top of that i'm going to put two liters of boiling water and that will dissolve the whole lot the sugar if you've ever put sugar on rhubarb you'll see the juice run when you put sugar on rhubarb the sugar and the acid to an extent which helps break down the fruit will draw out all that wonderful black curranty blackberry goodness into the liquid that the hot water provides once you've done that what i'm going to do is crush a single captain tablet between a couple of spoons and dissolve it in hot water and add that to the mix and the captain tablet will kill wild yeast then i'll just leave the whole lot for 24 hours to get those flavors out to let the campton tablet work and then we'll get on with the next step so let's take a look at those processes here we go the kilo and just plain white granulated sugar this is citric acid just a white powder it helps the yeast work well and it also will help break down that fruit and add a nice little zingy citrus note to the wine i really want to give this stuff a good mix get that sugar all mixed in crush the skins of any whole berries and get a whole lot into this beautiful dark rich liquid we're going to let that juice flow for 24 hours now last thing for today the first day we're going to put one of these campton tablet into that mix and kill off any wild yeast that's found its way in what i'm going to do crush it between two spoons just to help it dissolve put it in a jug with a little bit of boiling water dissolve it all up pour it into the mix that's a campton tablet about the size of an aspirin i suppose that sort of thing all i'll do pop it in the spoon put another spoon on top press hard it's a rock and then what i get is a nice powder that's easy to dissolve and i'll pop that in some boiling water give it a stir make sure it's fully dissolved add it to the mix i'm going to put a lid on seal it up keep out any dust and flies and we'll leave all of that now for 24 hours [Music] after 24 hours the campton tablet will have worked and we'll sort it out any wild use there's one other potential problem that we need to address at this point when we're using black currants particularly there's quite a lot of pectin in the fruit pectin's brilliant for jam it makes the jam set it makes wine cloudy but it's easy to sort out what we do at this stage just dissolve half a teaspoon of pectic enzyme into warm water once that's dissolved swirl it into the mixture and leave it for 24 hours and that'll break down any pectin that's naturally in the fruit make the wine much easier to clear petticoat enzyme dissolves really easily so that's simple we just pour that into the wine mast and wait for 24 hours [Music] well we've given that pectic enzyme more than 24 hours to break down any pectin that's in the wine we've actually given it 36 because life got in the way and i couldn't carry on yesterday today i want to do two things i want to measure the specific gravity of the wine and i want to do that for two reasons one is that by measuring the specific gravity at the beginning and the end i can work out how much alcohol is in the wine and for port that's really important the other one is by measuring specific gravity we can test when fermentation is complete we can test it accurately we're not guessing about bubbles going through airlocks and things like that that's also really really good it sounds scary done that specific gravity and measurements and hydrometers it really isn't so i'm going to spend just a couple of minutes to explain how it works and hopefully then you'll understand why i'm doing it and why it's a good idea to do it in making homemade wine let me explain then hydrometers and specific gravity really quickly this is a hydrometer it's a weighted stick weight at one end scale up here and right at this point here you can see a green and red line meet there is a number that says 1.000 now if i fill this measuring cylinder with pure water put that stick in it it will sink until the level of the water is right here and 1.000 is the specific gravity of pure water so this is what this is measuring is effectively the density of a liquid now if i dissolve some sugar in that water the density will increase less of the stick will sink and we'll get a raiding somewhere down here so it might be 1.070 for example so we know it's not pure water there's something dissolved in it because it's denser when you're wine making you can measure that at the beginning of the process and as you go through and as the yeast consumes the sugar gradually more and more and more of your hydrometer will sink until the level gets back to 1.000 when all the sugar has gone in fact it will even go beyond that because alcohol has a different density to water so it is quite possible and indeed quite likely when you're fermenting that not only will it come back to 1.000 but you could even end up at a level lower than that because what you're actually testing is a mix of alcohol and water not pure water we can use that in two ways if we take a measurement at the beginning of fermentation and a measurement at the end we can work out the change and with a little bit of maths the amount of that change will tell us how much alcohol is in the liquid the other thing we can do to determine whether fermentation is complete is take a hydrometer reading and if it has returned back to less than 1.000 we can be very confident that there is very little remaining sugar in our wine must i've put some of our wine must in the cylinder and i floated the hydrometer in there right up here is the level that would be level with the surface of pure water so you can see there's a massive difference because in this wine mass not only is there the kilo of sugar that we've added but it's all the natural fruit sugars that have dissolved out of the fruit along with other material so let's come in close get a reading off our hydrometer and see what the level is and then we can determine how that level changes through fermentation it's a little bit closer in now there is our 1.000 reading let's zoom in at the level of the liquid you can see it moves from green to white and that's at the point of 1.100 and that's a little bit above the surface of the liquid so our reading is 1.102 that original gravity measurement is going to give us a great baseline now for measuring what's happening and what's changing in the y as we go through it next step is to create a yeast starter culture put it in the wine now i'm going to start fermentation in the primary fermenter in the bucket because it could be quite a vigorous fermentation and if i did it in a demijohn it can foam through the airlock so for the first three or four days i'll ferment in the bucket and i'm going to leave the fruit in while that's happening to really get the last of that flavor out the yeast i'm going to use on this occasion is what's called gv2 gervin 2 very robust red wine yeast that ferments out to a good high alcohol level you could use the champagnes you could use a pork yeast they're fine too but general purpose wine yeast generally stops fermenting at a lower level of alcohol than we're going to want for our blackberry pork so a specialist yeast is called for i'm also going to put in a teaspoon full of yeast nutrient into the starter culture by starter culture what i mean is i'm going to dump that sachet teaspoon full of yeast nutrient into some apple juice stir it up get it rehydrated get it starting to ferment then put it into the blackberry port so let's do that now you can see bubbles forming on the surface here and that tells us the yeast is rehydrating it's coming back to life and it's starting to work so we can give it a quick stir pour it into the wine must put the lid back on and leave it till the violent fermentation is over [Music] after 24 hours you can probably see the amount of foam and froth that that yeast has caused in the wine that's why we don't start the fermentation in a demijohn we'll leave it in there for a few days till all of that calms down [Music] those first four days of primary fermentation some of the hottest days of the year and oh my goodness did that wine foam up it would have gone right through the airlock and the damage on so we did the right thing by putting it in a bucket today's job is to strain off the fruit which is very easy to do because it's in that fine mesh bag and then we're going to transfer the liquid into a clean sterilized image on and complete the fermentation so if i lift the bag out of the way you can see the liquid now is relatively calm i'm going to hang the bag up for a little bit let it all drip and drain and then we'll get that liquid into a demijohn bit of a side benefit of living in an old house is the ability to use old beams to hang up fruit bags to drain well that fruit is dripping and the demijohn is sterilizing i thought i'd do a quick hydrometer reading and goodness me because of that high heat this has been fermenting an incredible rate it is about 1.005 now and it was a very high initial reading because of the fruit sugar and the sugar that we added so almost all of that sugar has now been converted into alcohol and it's happened so fast because of the high reading to be honest i would have probably been safe getting this into the demijohn yesterday at a reading of about 1.030 but because of the high temperatures it's fermented faster than i would normally expect it to no harm done just interesting to note there's our wine i've squeezed the bag just gently with my hands to leave me with a dry pulp and get almost all of the liquid out i've also tasted the one with a spoon never be frightened to taste your wine as you're going along you can learn a lot from the change in flavor this wine started as a sweet almost syrupy liquid as almost all of that sugar is fermented out it's dry and it's actually verging on the sharp now and it'll get sharper still as the last of that sugar ferments out but we will address that as we move forward the next job then is just to take a simple siphon and siphon the liquid into the demijohn there we are i've got almost exactly a full gallon from the bucket i've done this recipe before i know how much water to add if you haven't got quite enough liquid top it up with cool tap water at this point to ensure that your demi john has a full gallon inside it one thing i am going to do now i'm going to tie some brown paper around the demijohn just to stop sunlight bleaching out that lovely rich purple color and lightening it as the fermentation carries on i'm going to leave the damage on until there are no more air bubbles passing through the airlock and at that point i'll use the hydrometer to test to ensure that specific gravity shows me that fermentation is complete there we are a little brown paper jacket for the damage on to keep that lovely purple color in the wine i'm gonna leave that now to fully ferment and i'm gonna stop the video at this point and we'll continue on in a part two we're covering a lot of advanced techniques in this sequence so we're gonna talk about things like stabilizing the wine clearing the wine we're going to use a technique called back sweetening which means we can stop the wine from fermenting and then add in more sweetness to get to the level of sweetness we want we're even going to talk about fortifying the wine and that's basically adding spirits to wine to bring them up to a full sort of 20 alcohol port strength so all of that's to come in the part two but i don't want to make this now manageably long video so i think it's better split up into bite-sized pieces if you've enjoyed today's bite can you give us a thumbs up down below and let us know in the comment if this slightly more adventurous wine making is for you if you're interested in it if you are we can certainly do more of it if you'd like to see the future parts hit that subscribe button and the bell next to if you're not already subscribed to the channel and you'll hear every time we post the updates and all the other small holding self-sufficiency self-reliance videos that we make but whatever you do come back and see us soon take [Music] foreign

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 40,004

Keywords: home brew, homebrew, country wine, wine making, home made wine, wine recipe, port recipe

Id: WrQ1iKTHBq4

Length: 21min 29sec (1289 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021