PROMETHEAN.DEFEAT

The old apartment climbs in heat, dangerously higher than the fruit could handle. Another day and work-worn, I go to our borrowed and air-conditioned abode. There, even a few defrosted blueberries have started fuzzing white with mold. Still hopeful for the batch, I toss the kin of Verminus out.
Hands purified (and not trusting my feet), I start the crush. Gravity has already broken a few berries. I could pour boiling water to start extraction, but that would water down the final result. I want a rich dry wine and adding water means adding sugar to keep the potential alcohol high (for each gram of sugar, I will get half a gram of alcohol). If I went down that path too soon, everything would taste like cane sugar not blueberries.Now any reasonable/rich winemaker would have a machine crusher/destemmer do all the work for them. Even body weight on feet or ancient plank presses would be more efficient than this. But how would I be sure that every berry met its fate? Hand crushing. I get more juice with natural sugars and flavors closer to the source. Yet after an hour of smashing, I'm spent. This really, really sucks.However, succumbing to the sweet siren call of using a potato masher would draw this ship to rocky ruin. Seeds contain nasty, astringent green-tasting tannins. Only flesh (or expensive tech) can break fruit without breaking seeds. So I press on...

Finally unbound from my mast, I need to separate juice from skins. Easy! I take my siphoning tube and pump. And pump. And...damnit! Nothing. The end is jammed. Plan B: Filter press them apart. Trying not stain the new (borrowed) apartment red, I slow pour into a filter bag. Once full, I squeeze the bag, dump the dry skins back in the crush bucket and pour it back into the bag.I keep at it for an hour but like a Promethean liver, juice keeps emerging with each cycle. The bag then breaks. But I string it up and kept going. This pressing process should get me 15-30% more juice than otherwise.Black fingered and exhausted by one in the morning, I quit. Almost ten pounds of blueberries had given me only three fourths of a gallon of juice and a hideous purple blob. Fermentation, racking and aging would evaporate the juice even further. Once the angles had taken their share, only a few bottles would remain.
Whatever. I re-bag the blob to ferment later with the juice. A CO2 blend is sprayed to protect the juice and then covered. Worry-worn, I wander back to my superheated apartment. The next day should see air-conditioning -and thus my wine to be- return home.

BLUISH.BARTERING

Five months after bottling my Barbarescanadianwelches "wine", the itch has returned. Against all odds, the remaining 20 bottles have avoided ruin, re-fermentation, or apartment explosion. They even taste a bit better with the bottle shock faded. Yet, with poor acidity and minimal tannin structure, I doubt their futures.

Therefore, this Aeneas must leave Dido and the lap of wine-kit-complacency. Destiny calls. Inching towards real wine, I set sail in hope of picking, crushing and fermenting my own. However, grapes still cling green to the vine with the harvest months away.

In my impatience, I aim to fool Bacchus.The blueberry, poor tough cousin to the grape, ripens with the arrival of August beneath the northeastern sun. This false berry rarely makes wine of merit. It bears the baggage of sweet confections and jams. Yet rich, dry red wine can be made from it. Thus, under spousal assistance (persistence), we pick go picking berries at Hand Mellon farm.My first day out, I ate more than I picked, got lost, came home happy and blue-fingered but disappointed by my lack of focus. Grape growers will plant different varietals and even various strains of the same grape in order to find the best match for their vineyard's growing conditions (climate, weather, soil and slope). Hand Mellon is no different.

They grow four kinds of blueberry: Chandler, Blue Crop, Spartan, Nelson. I could just ferment my first haul en mass. But that would tell me nothing about what each type could provide. Sure, I could doctor the mix by adding acidity or sugar later, but each manipulation would walk my drink further and further from its source, tasting more of my process and assumptions of how things should taste than of the fruit.

Luckily, while I wallowed in worry, my spouse went picking again. She returned with bags separating each type. For the sake of science, I analyzed each:
Chandler:
Medium, high pulp, small seed, black skin. Slightly sweet, low acidity, light bodied, tasty, fine.
Blue Crop:
Small, little pulp, small seed, red blue skin. Sweet, high acidity, medium bodied, high skin, cherry.
Spartan:
Large, high pulp, low seed, firm red purple skin. Medium sweet, medium acidity, medium bodied, very aromatic, typical blueberry and tangy green notes.
Nelson:
Large, high pulp, medium seed, black blue skin. Very sweet, low acidity, medium body, firm skin, mellow blueberry plum notes.
I needed bulk, so Spartans offered the best choice. However, blueberries have 45% (9.96g/100g) less sugars (half fructose, glucose and trace sucrose) than grapes have (15.48g/100g). Thus adding some Chandler and Nelson might fill that gap, while adding complexity to the batch.

With weather cleared, I returned to pick properly.
I worked fast, cutting ahead of kids, their parents and dogs from getting the better fruit. The season was on the wane by now.
At the counter, my haul included 4.5 lbs of Spartans, 2.5lbs of Chandlers, 1.25lbs of Blue Crop and 1lb of Nelsons. Nearly ten pounds seemed like a enough.

To avoid a massive, fuzzy, white outbreak of mold I washed my acquisitions. Freezing them was the internet's best advice for extraction, as the cold would break down cell walls.