Straightforward · 19.0 litres · Country red
Elderberry wine
The most tannic and most deeply coloured hedgerow fruit, and the closest a country wine gets to a serious red. It needs a year, and it repays one.
Starting sugar
20.6 Brix
4.26 kg of fermentable sugar
Original gravity
1.086
from the ingredients, not asserted
Finishing gravity
0.995
dry
Alcohol
11.9%
Brix alone predicts 11.4 to 12.4%
Residual sugar
0 g/L
approximate, from gravity
Ready after
12 months
best around 5 years
Made to Country red, and every computed figure lands inside the published range for it.
ABV inTA inpH inRS inWhat decides this wine
Heat the berries before fermenting, and use nothing green. Pour boiling water over the stripped berries and hold them there for ten minutes: it breaks down the glycosides, sets the colour and kills what is living on the fruit.
What goes in
| Ingredient | Weight | Sugar | Volume | Share of sugar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elderberries Strip the berries off every scrap of stem. The stems and unripe berries contain cyanogenic glycosides, and they also make the wine bitter. | 3.50 kg | 0.28 kg | 1.75 L | 7% |
| Raisins Chopped. Body and a vinous background, which is why every old recipe includes them. | 0.50 kg | 0.30 kg | - | 7% |
| White sugar | 3.00 kg | 3.00 kg | 1.89 L | 70% |
| Red grape concentrate | 1.00 kg | 0.68 kg | 0.77 L | 16% |
| Pectic enzyme | 8 g | - | - | 0% |
| Yeast nutrient | 12 g | - | - | 0% |
| Water, to volume | - | - | 14.60 L | - |
The ingredients contribute 4.4 litres and the water makes up the rest to 19 litres. Those figures are checked against each other when the site is built, because a recipe whose volumes do not add up produces a wine weaker or stronger than every number above.
Acid and sulphite
Acidity of the must
7.0 g/L
at pH 3.50
No malolactic
7.0 g/L
the acidity you measure is the acidity you keep
Potassium bicarbonate
21 g
to reach 6.0 g/L. Bench trial before treating the batch
Sulphite at bottling
0.9 g
potassium metabisulphite, for 28 mg/L free SO2 at pH 3.55
The batch
- Must volume
- 19 L
- Ferment at
- 18-22 C
- Molecular SO2 target
- 0.5 mg/L
- Malolactic
- No
- Yeast
- 71B for fruitto 14%, low N
The sulphite figure is worked out against the pH of the finished wine, not of the must. Malolactic and deacidification both raise pH, and dosing a finished red to its must pH under-protects it by roughly a third. Recompute for your own reading.
Method
- 01Strip the berries from the stems with a fork. Discard anything green or unripe.
- 02Put the berries and chopped raisins in a bucket and pour boiling water over them. Leave ten minutes.
- 03Stir in the sugar and concentrate and top up to volume with cold water.
- 04When it is below 25C add pectic enzyme, and pitch twelve hours later.
- 05Ferment on the pulp for five days, then press and finish in a carboy.
- 06Rack at dryness, sulphite, and bulk age a full year. This one is genuinely poor at six months.
The two instruments this recipe needs
Every number on this page came from a hydrometer reading and a pH reading. Without those two you are following a recipe rather than making a wine, and the sulphite figure in particular is meaningless without a pH you have actually measured.
Measuring
Hydrometer and trial jar
SOLIGT Triple Scale Hydrometer and Glass Test Jar for Wine, Beer, Mead & Cider - ABV, Brix and Gravity Test Kit
$18.98
Tracks the ferment from must to dry. The gap between your starting and finishing gravity is the only reliable way to know the alcohol you actually made.
Measuring
pH meter
Apera Instruments AI1113 pH Calibration Buffer Solution Kit (7.00, 4.00), 8 oz. Each
$18.00
The most important instrument on this page. pH decides how much of your sulphite is actually protecting the wine, and dosing without knowing it is guesswork.