you and me both enjoy some good footy-smelling wine
straight elderberry red has a pretty distinct aroma that I find a bit much but still canāt seem to leave alone if I pour a glass, but elderberry rose gets a much better reception and is a nice āconservationā wineāmake a base of sugar w/ lemon or other add-ins for acidity, or apple juice, or similar, and when you squeeze the elderberries from your straight batch put the strainings in the same size or slightly smaller volume to make a āsecond wineā (I took a 6-gallon batch of red and put the bag in 5 gallons of must)ā¦edit: Jack Keller has a good recipe as a starting point for elderberry roseā¦in fact if you look enough he has several. My only caveat would be avoid the dried elderberry recipe; the foot-aroma thing that I get some of in regular elderberry was ridiculously overpowering the one time I made a batch w/ dried berries from a homebrew shopā¦
and yes a cup or 2 in a full batch of black currant, blackberry, etc. adds complexity as well as a LOT of colorā¦
I think my recipe used white grape juice for a first and second run to make a red and a blush. I have also used elderberry to make Mead (melomel). That was ok, the honey got lost under the elder.
Of course, itās best if the berries are absolutely completely totally ripe, otherwise the slightly weird flavor of elderberry becomes unpleasant and you get more of the green goo.
My bushes were just starting to turn purple when we moved. I uncovered the berries to let the birds clean up. I figured better birds than SWD!
So today i picked enough for a half-recipe of elderberry pie filling and cooked itā¦hopes werent high but i tried anyway, and filling has none of that elderberry funk. I may try boiling briefly before making wine next timeā¦
Interestingā¦
Iāve made jelly before, but the wild ones Iāve always gotten donāt release their stems very well. Pie full of stems just didnāt sound good.
Come to think of it, Iāve had wine made from elderberries in those giant cans from the wine supply store and it was very good. Canned fruit would of course be cooked!
Tried that. Tried floating them too. Tried everything the internet suggested. They would release from the big stem with a tiny hair-like stem attached securely to the very soft, very ripe berry. That tiny stem refused to let go unless pinched off individually. I gave up and made jelly! I figured it was a quirk of the variety (wild).
The SWD wiped me out! We had a lot of rain in early August just when the elderberries were ripening 2 weeks early. These were the largest berries Iāve ever grown. As I approached the back yard, I could smell fermentation - not rot. There was a bird chirping at me on the ground and it didnāt move, just sang happily on the ground. There were 10-15 others on low branches. There were swarms of SWD I could hear buzzing. Maybe that was the wasps and bees, lol. I tasted some berries that looked good and they were very sweet ( I didnāt know the got that sweet). However, most had outright fermented like 5th day ferment. Thatās when I figured out the loud crazy birds were drunk!
I forgot to say that because of the severe wet spring weather that took it most of my fruit trees, sweet cherries, peach plums, I did limited spraying . Last year I got away with spraying my elderberry once and got a fly free crop. I didnāt spray it at all and got drunk birds
