Good Ol’ Traditional Elderflower Wine

 This is the time of year when elderflowers are everywhere. The elder is a very hardy tree that can grow in land with poor nutrition, it can cope with pollution and is distinctive for is wizened bark and lacy, cream coloured flowers which are abundant at the start of the summer. Last year I made a couple of batches of Elderflower wine using two different recipes. One was a great success and the other, well, it’s still in the demijohn and doesn’t look too appetizing. I recently gave away a couple of bottles of batch 1 and they were extremely well received. So much so that one recipient has asked for the recipe. So this is for someone we’ll call Trad Jen (because that’s her name) but I hope everyone else enjoys it too.

You will need:

Ingredients
1 pint of elderflowers (more of this in a bit)
2 lemons
3lb sugar
6 pints boiling water
1 tsp wine yeast
1 tsp yeast nutrient

Equipment
Zester, lemon squeezer, large 1 gallon pan, demijohn, airlock

Choosing your elderflowers and getting a pint worth is key. You need to smell the elderflowers before you pick them as some don’t smell too good. Some of the winemaking books I have describe the smell as ‘catty’ by which I think they mean they smell like cat piss. Other times I have smelt some that, to be frank, smell a bit like sperm – that’s right, boy juice. These varieties should be avoided. Your wine will taste of the smell you ferment so make sure they smell sweet and elderflowery. Pick them on a warm sunny day when they are fully open; this prevents excessive amounts of insects and ensures maximum flavour. You need approx 10 large heads or 15-20 smaller ones.

Method
1. Boil 6 pints of water

2.Pick or cut the flowers off the stalks and measure them out. You need a pint which is where they are loosely packed and not squashed down.

3. Zest the lemons and add the zest to the flowers

4. Squeeze the juice out of the lemons, remove any pips, cover and put in the fridge.

5. Add the flowers and the lemon zest to the boiled water, leave to cool.

6. Go do something fun like topless underarm farts or sitting on a roof top barking at the birds or streaking across a cricket pitch. Whatever you do it needs to last 3 days as that’s how long you’re leaving the flowers and lemon zest to infuse.

7. After 3 days, if you have the energy after all the fun stuff you’ve been doing, strain off the flowers and zest – be sure to save the liquid as this will become your wine. Discard the flowers, they’re done with now.

8. Add the sugar and that lemon juice you saved. Point to note here is that 3lbs sugar was a touch too sweet for me but Trad Jen has a very sweet tooth and she loved it. This year I added 1kg (approx 2.2lb).

9. Add the yeast and yeast nutrient and pour the whole lot into a demijohn then fit an airlock and leave in a warm place.

The fermentation will be very vigorous to start with and you’ll enjoy hearing the bubbles plup through the airlock. You’ll note that we haven’t filled the demijohn but that’s deliberate because if you fill it to the shoulder the must will bubble out of the airlock and all over your airing cupboard or whichever other warm place you’ve put the demijohn. It’s no fun when that happens. When the initial fermentation has quietened you can add some cool boiled water so that the wine reaches the neck of the demijohn. This is more or less it. After a month or so you’ll need to rack the wine off the lees into a clean demijohn and keep doing this until the wine is clear and the bubbling has stopped. It’ll then be ready to bottle.

Couldn’t be much easier could it? And it’s really lovely. And it costs sweet flop all which is always a Brucie Bonus!

The Future’s Bright, But It’s Not Cucumber

My favourite alcoholic beverage is gin. I love it. Not for everyone, too perfumey for some, but I love it. My favourite gin for summer is Hendricks; taken as intended with ice and slices of cucumber instead of lime. Lip smackingly refreshing. Cucumber is one of the botanicals that Hendricks use in their distillation process and they proclaim, “Our gin is for those rare individuals who are excited by what is strange and different.”

I was thinking how lovely a cold, revitalizing glass of Hendricks is on a late summer afternoon as some of the heat is seeping from the day. And I was also thinking about what the scientist said, “you can make wine out of anything…” and I ended up thinking how fabulous cucumber wine would be, just a light suggestion of cucumber in a crystal clear, almost colourless, wine with just a pale tint of green… This would need to be made in January to allow at least six months for it to mature, ready for the hot afternoons of July and August.
I googled ‘cucumber wine recipe’ and found a number of wine forums where members had been asking the same question as me, “How do I make cucumber wine?” Turns out no-one seemed to know and then eventually I found it:-

Ingredients
4lb Cucumber
2 Oranges
2 Lemons
7 Cups of Sugar
1tsp Pectic Enzyme
1tsp Wine Yeast
1tsp Yeast Nutrient
5g Tannin

Method
1. Wash the cucs and cut them into pieces
2. Wash oranges & lemons, slice thinly and add to cucs
3. Add sugar & poor 1 gallon boiling water over the mixture
4. Add pectic enzyme when cooled
5. After 24 hours add yeast. Stir daily for 5 days
6. Strain, pour into demijohn & fit airlock
7. Rack after 3 weeks and every month for 6 months then bottle

Simple recipe right? Note I was doing this just a week after I first tried to make pear wine which was at that point bubbling its way through the airlock and all seemed well. The first thing that didn’t seem quite right about this wine was the smell created shortly after the boiling water was added. My theory for the production of the stink was that the acid from the oranges and lemons, coupled with the heat from the boiling water, pickled the cucumbers. The best way to describe the acrid stench was to liken it to the aroma of gherkins. At this point it didn’t smell like something I would want to eat let alone drink. However, trusting the recipe and my complete lack of instinct, I carried on.
And here I made the first mistake (that I was aware of). The recipe called for 5g of tannin, an ingredient that gives wine a bit of bite and is naturally occurring in grapes, so I needed to add 1 teaspoon per gallon. Somehow I misunderstood this simple instruction and added 5 teaspoons into the must.

Fermentation in the demijohn didn’t last that long but the wine wouldn’t clear. With the benefit of experience and a further 18 months of wine making this is probably because the yeast had not settled. Since the pear wine, which was only a week older, was nowhere near as cloudy (although still not clear) I determined it was caused by amateur inexperience rather than anything else. All wine books feature sections on what to do about cloudy wine. One method was to add a chemical of which I had precisely none. Another option was to add egg white. Here is what the book said:
“You must use isinglass or egg white to ensure the wine is perfect to look at. The white of one egg is sufficient for several gallons. Whisk until firm, add to the wine in the container and leave for 24 hours. You should then be satisfied with the results”
Have you ever added a beaten egg white to wine? Exactly. Why on earth would you?! The result, I have to say, was far from satisfying. The egg white floated down through the wine, after much trouble shovelling it through the neck of the demijohn, and settled at the bottom, taking on an unappetizing curdled appearance.

I was very concerned about any of this vom-inducing egg white ending up in the bottled wine and so I thought of filtering it, an alternative method offered in the books. This involved a trip to a local home brew supplier. The owner was initially helpful but I was hesitant in sharing with him the type of wine I was trying to clear. Such hesitancy was justified when his face displayed a mixture of mystification and disgust. He hadn’t heard of Hendricks and when I admitted to my mistake with the tannin he turned his back on me and started moving the things around on the shelves behind the counter. I took my filters and left .

So then I bottled the wine. It still didn’t smell at all appetising and despite the limitless enthusiasm of my wife I didn’t believe it would be at all drinkable.

And so, it is completely undrinkable.  I’m told. I’ve not had a go myself, being completely put off by the smell, but friends and family have been brave and polite (and possibly just a tiny little bit tapped) and have taken sips, pulled faces and said things I will not repeat here. Maybe it’s because the cucumbers were actually pickled – and who would want gherkin wine – or maybe it’s because I added too much tannin, or maybe it’s because the egg whites have gone off adding sulphur to the taste sensation.

It’s not actually that off the wall to think of cucumber wine to be fair. There’s the world famous Hendricks as I have already mentioned and on top of that Pepsi
have a cucumber infused version of its Cola available in Japan and Gatorade have  ‘Limon Pepino’ (Lime Cucumber) aimed at the Hispanic market, the latter getting favourable online reviews. But still, if after reading this some form of chromosome deficiency causes you to think making cucumber wine sounds like a good idea, I’d suggest the following changes:
- Liquidise  rather than chop the cucs
- Add cold water not boiling water
- Don’t add any tannin – at all

If I ever forget I have a life and I attempt this again that’s what I’d do differently. If you have a go – do let me know how you get on won’t you.

The look of Success

In February I made some wine using wild red currents I had picked from along the railway embankment the previous June. It fermented and cleared quickly and was bottled this weekend.

There was a small amount left over which I sampled…

Although (one of the) recipes suggested this should be left to mature for a year, I have to say, this was fab. My greatest success to date. When the red currents are in season I’ll blog again with the recipe. Until then, let your mouth water!

So Annie are oak leaf, are you oak leaf Annie?

Wondering what to do this weekend? Do what I’m doing and make yourself a gallon or so of oak leaf wine. As a start in homemade wine making it couldn’t be easier and trust me it tastes gooood!

It needs to be done this weekend as, if you wait, the oak leaves become too mature. The more mature the leaves, the more tannins in them. Tannins are an important part of wine making but too many make the wine bitter. (Hmm, I feel like I actually know what I’m talking about) So I urge you to go strip some young leaves off an oak tree* and if you can’t make the wine this weekend, put them in the freezer for later.

You need a “gallon” which is about a carrier bag full of oak leaves. As you’re picking them you’ll notice how sweet and spring-like they smell and you’ll start to imagine how good the wine will taste. It’s nice to pick them in the rain, which is handy considering the weather.

You need a white plastic bucket or fermentation bin – not metal. It’s important that it’s white because with coloured plastics it can taint the wine somehow (so say the Books).

Then it’s really simple:
1. Wash the leaves in cold water and put in the bucket
2. Boil 3lb of sugar in 8 pints of water until dissolved and pour over the leaves
3. Stir in 2 tsp citric acid (or the juice of 2 lemons)
4. Leave for 24 hours and then strain the liquid into a demijohn
5. Add 1 tsp brewing yeast and 1 tsp yeast nutrient, shake and fit with an air lock

Then you follow the usual steps, leave in a warm place, rack off the lees (dead yeast cells that settle at the bottom of the demijohn) and when the bubbling stops rack again and bottle, it makes about six bottles.

This is the recipe I used last year and we tried the wine at Christmas. Like a lot of white wines it smelt vaguely cheesy. I liked the taste but it was a bit sweet for me and didn’t taste that alcoholic. My brother-in-law loved it as it didn’t leave the “funny after taste” like some wines can. My father-in-law loved it too and, judging by how flushed their faces became and how loud their voices were after a few glasses, it must have been more alcoholic than I could taste…

This time I’ll be adding a kilo of sugar (approx 2.2 lbs) as recommended by the scientist of foraging-map fame. Go on, give it a try, you won’t regret it.

*maybe more than one tree come to think of it - you want to make sure it survives to give you another crop of vibrant leaves for next year’s wine making don’t you!

Fervent Fermentation

The catalyst for my decision to embark on a new hobby in wine making was a friend giving me a glass of her homemade elderflower chardonnay. It was delicious and my enthusiasm for its taste was matched by her enthusiasm for the ease of its making.

Then she did show me her strawberries and cream coloured rosehip must that gently bubbled in a demijohn, she told me you can make wine from anything: you boil parsnips and use the water, harvest wild blackberries and elderberries and mash them, pick the petals of dandelions or hawthorne blossom, add some yeast and sugar and a few months later you have wine. “It’s so simple and it’s so cheap” she said.

Then she did show me the map on her wall of her local suburb which was covered in little coloured stickers that marked foraging locations. These were numbered and a key at the side revealed she had found apple trees, plum trees, gooseberries, rhubarb, sloe berries and more. All growing wild and going free.

She didn’t have anything else we could taste as, since it was all so good, it was consumed very quickly. I looked at her red nose and the broken veins in her ruddy cheeks and had no reason to doubt her.  

I was inspired. I was enthused. I was clueless.

I had to have a go at this. How difficult could it be? She had some wine making books to guide her and I think it’s important to note I consider her a scientist of sorts. An intelligent woman who knows about yeast and fermentations whether they are aerobic or anaerobic. We did A-Levels together, back at the end of the 80′s, Chemistry and Biology to be precise. She worked hard and got A grades, I discovered drink and girls and scraped a D – that’s right, just the one. I think this is important as, with all recipes, there is some science involved and whilst I can follow instructions I don’t really understand why it turns out like it does.

So I did have the bug but no equipment and no know-how neither and since the point, as I saw it, of home brewed wine was that it was cheap, I wasn’t going to spend any money getting it. I trawled every charity shop in our town looking for a wine making book – nothing. I talked excitedly to everyone in the family about my intention to start home brewing, dropping heavy hints about a desire for demijohns and fermenation locks in my Christmas stocking. I talked to friends and my colleagues at work and I would have even talked about it to the people on the bus if I’d had cause to be on one.

Turns out everyone knows someone who has tried to make wine. Everyone has a tale whether it’s a bung wedged into the plaster on the underside of the staircase forced there by an explosive fermenation, moonshine that makes you pissed again every time you take in any fluids for days after drinking it, homebrews that are delightful or homebrews that dissolve the enamel off your bath never mind off your teeth. Yes, everyone had a story to tell but no one had any recipes and no one had any equipment, and that included Santa Claus.

But as I was suspecting I might have to buy new I struck lucky. My ever supportive wife was talking to a fellow mum at the school gates and as it turned out she used to make wine, memorable elderflower champagne by all accounts, there were recipes and unwanted demijohns, mine for the taking.

My scientist friend, meanwhile, had located a wine making book in a local charity shop and, after much persuasion, it was mailed to me.

So this is how it began. I’ll be blogging about my experiences and my recipes, my failures and (when I have them) my succeses, mainly in relation to my wine making but there’s other interesting stuff isn’t there and so I’ll blog about that too.