The Blackberry wine has been bubbling away in my utility room in the primary fermenter. The first step was to extract the juice for 3 days by leaving it to stand in water, stirring occasionally. I strained the lot last Thursday and added wine yeast. It started to work very quickly and the carbon dioxide pushed up any remaining pulp to the surface of the wine.

I made Blackberry conserve with the pulp (100g sugar per 450g of pulp - that's a conversation from Imperial 4oz sugar/lb). Of course, because I'm on a diet that doesn't allow sugars except on Saturdays, I have been unable to taste the conserve. I didn't get around to it last weekend. I'm not too bothered if it is diabolical - I will probably find out this weekend. If it is edible, at least I can be pleased with myself that this is a waste-free enterprise.

I have a suspicion that the fruit had started to naturally ferment during the soak on day 3, so this wine (and conserve) could be a disaster, but let's see. Anyway, tonight I strained it into a demijohn. Soon it should start bubbling away, happy and content where it will stay until it works itself out. It's in my office covered in a black sack to stop the light getting at it.

By the way, this way the primary fermentation looked like:

[caption id="attachment_9043" align="aligncenter" width="300"] A fermenting thing[/caption]