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

1. Remove and discard the stalks from the flowers.

2. 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.

3. Strain the elderflower water into a demijohn. Add the juice and a cold cup of tea (no milk!).

4. Dissolve the sugar in boiling water and add to the demijohn when it has cooled a bit.

5. Add the enzyme, yeast and nutrient and leave to ferment.

6. 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.

7. (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%.

This bottle came from a case bought from Virgin Wines. We were surprised to find it was 15% alcohol - I don't think I've seen a normal non fortified wine at this strength. It didn't taste strong but after drinking a glass, I could certainly tell that I'd had a drink. It was a dry pleasant tasting wine.

I've bottled our Blackberry and Elderberry wine. I started fermenting it back in October and it's been sitting in the demijohn since then, maturing.

After filling 6 bottles there was about a glass left over so we sampled it tonight. It's fairly light flavoured, unlike my first attempt at this wine which was really full bodied. It has a reasonable fruity taste. I'll leave it in the shed for a few months to mature, to see if it improves with age.

I used 2.4kg of fruit in total. I can't remember (and didn't write down) whether I used any grape concentrate or raisins. Next time, I'll either use more fruit or supplement it with some grape or apple juice to give it more body.

The Birmingham German Winefest started today, in Victoria Square. There are stalls selling German food and drink, with wines from most parts of the country. Unlike the rubbish sold in most supermarkets, most of this isn't sweet Liebfraumilch but proper stuff, with a wide range of whites (dry to sweet), reds, rose and sparkling wine.

I've never tried a german sparkling wine before so I bought a bottle of medium-dry sparkling reisling. It was sweeter than I am used to (mainly the excellent but very dry Lindaur) but it was impressive stuff. It's a mystery why supermarkets can't sell stuff like this. It was better than most Cava wines.

Apricot Wine
It was drunk at room temperature rather than chilled but it was good. Quite light flavoured but you could make out the apricot taste. If I tried it again I might try more apricot or leave the dried apricots to soak for longer.

Jam Wine
Quite light in flavour. Served chilled it worked well as a mixer. Tried it with white rum (ok), gin (worked well), Tropical Sourz (worked well) and Grenadine (just seemed to make it taste sweeter).

Berry Wine
This is the strongest flavoured of our wines so far, and with (in my opinion) the right balance of sweetness and depth of flavour. Also works well in a turbo purple

• 600g of dried apricots.
• 500g pears.
• 1kg sugar.
• 1 small tin of white grape concentrate.

Wash the fruit in a dilute sodium metabisulphite solution, then chop and put into a large pan. Add the sugar, cover with water and bring to the boil. Turn off the heat and leave to cool.
Pour into a sterilized fermentation bin. Add 1tsp of pectin enzyme, 1tsp of yeast nutrient and the yeast. Leave for a few days, occasionally mashing the fruit to get more juice out. Strain into a demijohn, add the grape concentrate and top up to 1 gallon with water. Fit the airlock.

When the fermentation has stopped (or the wine has reached the desirable sweetness), add some wine stabiliser. The wine will need to be clarified either by adding finings or syphoning into a 2nd demijohn and leaving to settle. Or both if the wine is quite cloudy.

Berry Wine

This used the berries we collected in the autumn, along with some plums to increase the fruit level to around 3½ pounds.

• 2½ pounds elderberries
• ½ pound blackberries
• ½ pound plums

The fruit was washed in a metabisulphite solution before being boiled in a pan with 4 pints of water and 1kg of sugar. The mixture was poured into a fermenting bin to stand for a few days. 1 teaspoon each of pectin enzyme, yeast nutrient and brewing yeast were added. The fruit mixture was then sieved into a demijohn, a tin of grape concentrate and water was added to take it to 1 gallon.
After a few weeks a thick sediment had formed so the liquid was syphoned into a clean demijohn and the volume was topped up with water - actually 200g sugar dissolved in water because the mixture was tasting too 'dry'.
A month later and fermentation had stopped. The wine was tasted and seemed ready for bottling. Wine stabiliser was added. After leaving to settle for a few more days, the wine was decanted into clean sterilised bottles. It's supposed to have several months to mature but I think I'll try a bottle over Christmas.

Jam Wine

This was more of an experiment. I used 3 jars of jam to provide the sugar and fruit content (plum, blackcurrant and strawberry jams), and added 2 teaspoons of pectin enzyme. No extra sugar was added and I used bakers yeast instead of brewers yeast to stop the alcohol content getting too high. Unfortunately I only got 4½ bottles out of it because so much sediment formed in the demijohn.