23 pounds frozen black berries
3 pounds frozen blue berries
28 cups white sugar
4 gallons water
1 3/4 teaspoons tannin
6 teaspoons bentonite
1 3/4 teaspoons yeast nutrient
4 teaspoons pectic enzyme
8 campden tablets
4 teaspoons yeast energizer
Lalvin 71B-1122 yeast.
Total of 8 gallons of must at 22.5 Brix i.e. 1.095 SG

Started this on 11/05/09. I'm now in a 5 & 3 gallon secondary. Bubbling away.

That sounds amazing. I made a similar blackberry/blueberry fruit wine a few years ago in a smaller 3 gal batch. Mine came out flaverful, but was more dry than I had wanted and wasn't as "thick" as i thought it might be. I've thought about trying it out again and adding some glycerin or perhaps by using honey instead of sugar.

How else might I get around those dry and thin issues?

The above blackberry is quite dry. I lived in Torrance CA for 40 years so have gravitated to very dry wines. I have never tried glycerin for body in wines. I know they use glycerin in many products. You could back sweeten this black berry for a little more sweetness.

To really get the full body that you feel like in a Merlot wine I suspect you would need to make the wine with 100% black berries and no water like most commercial wine is made. A rough calculation would be about 15 pounds of blackberries per gallon. Close to 75 pounds for a 5 gallon batch which would yield about 2 cases of wine. Your cost would be about $12 a bottle which still isn't too bad for a good blackberry wine. Another possibility that I haven't tried but plan in a future project is to add bananas to the fruit wine to gain some more body.

I think banana is a fairly subtle flavor when compared to other fruits such as the berries, so i'm not sure how well the banana flavor would come out when paired with something else. It would certianly be interesting to try. I think that in my banana mead the majority of the body feel was due to the honey I used in place of sugar. Honey itself will change the flavor it bit depending on where that honey came from, but it went very well with my banana and did give it a nice body.

I was on a couple of other forums some time ago and several had mentioned that they thought bananas produced some body in the wine. I only wanted to try them for body, not necessarily for the banana flavor.

Honey is a thought because I could ferment it out.

I got some literature on glycerin and found a couple of sources but never gave it a try. One reason was what I read is that glycerin will tend to give a sweet taste in addition to the body. Nothing wrong, except I'm kinda for strong dark black coffee flavor, not even a hint of sweetness.

Good to have you on the forum. I have no chemistry background and I'm sure I will have some questions from time to time.