Dried Elderberry Wine 1

Started  20th May 2012

We had 1.5lbs of dried elderberries, so we decided to get this on the go today. The sooner it's started, the sooner we can drink it. Various elderberry wine recipes suggest it could take anything from a few weeks to several months, and most suggest it improves with age, so we'll see how it goes. 1.5lbs of dried elderberries is enough for 3 gallons of wine.

We can make a second (smaller) batch from the pulp of the first batch. Re-using pulp with the same quantities of water and sugar will make a lighter wine, but if we go for half quantities of water and sugar, it should be better.

Recipes tend to recommend a Bordeaux or Burgundy yeast. We don't have a winemaking shop nearby - the closest is about 10 miles away - so we tend to just use ordinary red wine yeast from Wilkinsons. We could order online, but we're still beginners so would prefer to buy any "special" yeasts etc from a proper winemaking shop so that we can get good advice at the time.

Note for step 1 - This recipe required disolving sugar in water, boiling elderberries, simmering currants etc. We don't have cooking pots big enough to do it all in one go, so we did it all in smaller batches until it was all in the bucket.


Dried Elderberry Wine 1
Ingredients:
1.5lbs dried elderberries
7.5lbs sugar
3 gallons water
1.5lbs currants (or 750ml red grape juice concentrate)
3 teaspoons citric acid
3 teaspoons pectolase
3 teaspoons yeast nutrient
Red wine yeast

Step 1:
Disolve 1.5lbs sugar in 3 pints water, add some elderberries, bring to the boil for a couple of minutes, empty into bucket. Repeat 4 more times.
Put 1lb currants in 3 pints water, bring to boil and simmer for 30 minutes, then add to bucket. Repeat twice more.
Cover bucket and leave to cool for 24 hours

Step 2:
Add citric acid, pectolase, yeast nutrient and yeast to the bucket.
Stir well, cover bucket.
Stir every day for a week, pushing the fruit pulp down into the bucket.

Dried Elderberry Wine

Step 3:
Strain liquid into demijohns, add bungs and airlocks, leave to ferment until clear.
Rack and bottle.

Results so far:
When making big batches of wine in this way, waiting for water to boil etc, it's easy to lose count of how many pounds of sugar you've added. Tip - don't do it when other people can distract you.
This wine actually stayed in the bucket for 2 weeks, mainly because we simply didn't have time to strain it last weekend.
There was so much fruit in this bucket, it bubbled over out of the bucket, leaving a sticky tar-like mess everywhere. On the plus side, the mess was quite easy to clean up.