Nice Elderberry Website

[smurfe]

One of the members of another wine forum I moderate has a very nice Elderberry website. I know there has been some discussion here about Elderberry wine so I thought I would post the link to his site. It has a lot of general information about elderberries as well as winemaking techniques for this fruit. Enjoy.

http://www.geocities.com/wvmountaineerjack/Elderberries/Elderberries.html

Smurfe

 

[Caplan]

Interesting that they have dedicated so much space to the Elder for just the berries. Do you know if they use the fresh flowers for wine? They make a great white.

 

[smurfe]

I haven't heard him talk about that. Interesting though. I will ask and see if they use the flowers as well.

Smurfe

 

[CrackedCork]

Hi Smurfe, thanks for the posting.

Caplan, while we have made elderberry wine from the berries this is only our first year trying to make the wine from the flowers. We cut off flowers from some of our first year bushes to keep them from using up energy making fruit so they would be stronger this year. It smelled very good making it, we are still waiting to see what it tastes like. Would you mind sharing your elderflower experience with us?

thanks

CrackedCork

Interesting that they have dedicated so much space to the Elder for just the berries. Do you know if they use the fresh flowers for wine? They make a great white.

 

[Caplan]

Welcome aboard CrackedCork! The main thing with the flowers is to just use the petals and keep out as much 'green stalky bits' as possible. It's a time consuming process but worth it IMHO.

 

[CrackedCork]

Do you mean you dont want to clip the flower buds off close to the end with scissors but instead try to pluck all those little petals off? No way, cant be done , the whole little unit the petals attach too have to come off with them right> Crackedcork

Welcome aboard CrackedCork! The main thing with the flowers is to just use the petals and keep out as much 'green stalky bits' as possible. It's a time consuming process but worth it IMHO.

 

[Luc]

Do you mean you dont want to clip the flower buds off close to the end with scissors but instead try to pluck all those little petals off? No way, cant be done , the whole little unit the petals attach too have to come off with them right> Crackedcork

Hi there Crackedcork,

Nice to meet you here.

But I am afraid Caplan is right. I also pick just the flower petals and leave back all (or as much as possible) green. Only I do it by hand and not by using scissors.

I then soak them in water with a few lemons for 3 days and then add sugar and boil.
This gives the best syrup around. But indeed no green in it.

I think there is a difference between European and US elderberries that makes this (at last for me) easy to do.

Luc

 

[CrackedCork]

I reviewd Mr. Jack Kellers website on elderflower wine which we are following and his recipie says flower, not petals, so at least I know we can make it from the whole flower. Each big brachet has like 100 little flowers (each of which makes 1 individual berry) which has the petals, just to make sure we are talking about the same thing. If you guys are actually just picking the petals off of the tiny little flowers to make wine my hat is off to you. No way on earth could we possibly be patient enough to collect enough petals by picking the off of the individual flowers. Now if you went up to the big bracket of flowers and shock the whole head into a bucket to collect whatever comes off I could see that working, but picking each petal off of each flower from a big bunch of flowers in a brachet is rough. We will see how ours turns out with the individual flowers before making up our minds to keep going with elderflower wine.

Crackedcork

 

[Caplan]

If you guys are actually just picking the petals off of the tiny little flowers to make wine my hat is off to you. No way on earth could we possibly be patient enough to collect enough petals by picking the off of the individual flowers.

It's quicker than you think really.

You just gently 'pull' the whole flower heads through your fingers to get the petals off - We don't sit there with a "she loves me..... she loves me not...." light fingered approach to individual petal pulling!

It doesn't take as long as you think really to get a 5 US gallon batch worth of petals. 2 people could do it in an hour and a half easily.

 

[CrackedCork]

Caplan, that is exactly how I pictured you guys picking off flower petals I read somewhere, dont have the reference to give credit where credit is due, that you can freeze the whole flower head and then just shake the petals off. I think I will give that method a try this year. I have a bunch of elderberries and I can cut off the flowers on the lower limbs anyway to keep them off of the ground. Thanks, CrackedCOrk

It's quicker than you think really.

You just gently 'pull' the whole flower heads through your fingers to get the petals off - We don't sit there with a "she loves me..... she loves me not...." light fingered approach to individual petal pulling!

It doesn't take as long as you think really to get a 5 US gallon batch worth of petals. 2 people could do it in an hour and a half easily.