WineMaker thanks frequent contributor Tim Patterson for making his wine blending spreadsheet available to home winemakers.

Click here to download the Blending Spreadsheet.

An easy way to track the consequences of blending is to use a spreadsheet, with formulas that do the math for you automatically as you enter the numbers for the participating wines. Once you get beyond two-grape blends, pencil and paper arithmetic becomes a chore. The spreadsheet format is another way to do "what if?" blending - to see, for example, what would be needed to correct an acid balance problem, or what another two gallons (7.6 L) of Grenache would do to the profile of a blend.

The formulas in the cells can be employed over and over; Just plug in the numbers for each potential component of any blend, let the spreadsheet run the numbers, and print out the blend statistics for your winemaking log notebook.

The TA column contains Total Acidity in grams per liter; the SO2 column shows the parts per million of SO2; the rs column shows residual sugar as a percentage of volume.

Cells in the % Blend column simply divide the number of gallons for that component by the total gallons. The Alc values for each grape are created by multiplying the Brix figure by 0.55, which provides a rough estimate. The cells in the Column Totals row show the sum of the value in each row above multiplied by the number of gallons for that wine; the Blend Totals row simply divides the Column Totals values by the total number of gallons in the overall blend.