Elderberry Wine

Last year my friend and fellow wine maker Steve gave us about 25 pounds of elderberries. We took them home and threw them in the freezer. This past winter we had to make room in the freezer so it was time to make Elderberry wine.

Elderberries are a big pain in the butt to process. Tons of them grow on these very thin stems that you don’t really want to have in your fermentor. So you have to destem them, actually freezing the berries and stems first helps in this process. However it still took two evenings of destemming to get through them all. Additionally the edlerberries are a deep reddish purple and they like to stain things.

Elderberries have very little sugar of their own so making wine from them is pretty much impossible without chaptalizing. I added around 10 pounds of sugar as well as water to bring my volume to 5.5 gallons. The starting gravity was 1.102 and I pitched Premier Cuvee yeast.

After about a week of fermentation I pressed the wine gently to remove the berries and transferred it to a secondary it was nearly done fermenting by then and had a good flavor. Most recipes for elderberry wine say to sweeten it but I think this could make a pretty decent dry wine after a few years of aging.