Elderflower Wine |
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26/Jul/2009 |
I started this wine on June 1st. The recipe was based on one I found on a homebrew forum.
Ingredients
elderflowers: 2 handfuls
white grape juice: 1 litre
apple juice: 1 litre
sugar: 500g
lemon juice: 2 tbs
tea: 1 bag
pectin enzyme: 1tsp
bakers yeast: 1tsp
yeast nutrient: 1tsp
The juice was simply cheap supermarket cartons of 'shelf juice' rather than fresh unpasteurised 'fridge juice'.
Method
Remove and discard the stalks from the flowers.
Put the elderflowers in a fermenting bucket and pour over a couple of pints of boiling water. Add a crushed campden tablet and leave for 48 hours, stirring occasionally.
Strain the elderflower water into a demijohn. Add the juice and a cold cup of tea (no milk!).
Dissolve the sugar in boiling water and add to the demijohn when it has cooled a bit.
Add the enzyme, yeast and nutrient and leave to ferment.
When it has finished fermenting, optionally clear with finings and rack into a clean demijohn. If a still wine is desired, add a campden tablet and stabiliser.
(Optional) To make a sparkling wine, do not add stabiliser. Syphon into pressure bottles (e.g. plastic 1 litre lemonade bottles). Add 1 tsp sugar and a small amount of an active yeast starter. Keep in a warm room for a couple of weeks then store somewhere cool to mature.
Tasting notes
Serve chilled, this is the nicest white wine I've made so far. The flavour is light and refreshing. I attempted to make a sparkling wine by following step 7. The bottles pressurised but the resulting wine wasn't fizzy. The wine still tasted good so I consider the experiment to be a success. I still have some elderflowers in the freezer so I might try again but add slightly more sugar and yeast in step 7.
The recipe only used 500g of sugar because I was aiming for a sparkling wine with a low-ish alcohol content of around 9%. For a more traditional still wine, a higher alcohol content might be preferred so increasing the sugar content to 750g would increase the alcohol to 13-14%.