OK, so your fruitwine.json only refers to bottles. That's the file I based my 2 stages of wine after, but I made it so that once it becomes the final tier of wine, which takes 15 months, it doesn't have any transitions. That's why I was searching how to make the barrel still make wine into vinegar.
I have no issue at all with you implementing these types of changes yourself, before I published the mod I was going to contact you to make sure it was ok to use your wine in my mod.