Elderberry Wine Recipe

At the end of summer and early fall the wild elderberries are ready for harvesting.

It’s our family’s seasonal rhythm to make elderberry syrup every fall for immune system boosting

We usually either freeze or dehydrate the berries and make the syrup on demand. Because they grow in abundance here we’ve been meaning to make elderberry wine and in 2015 we did!

Elderberries are abundant to forage for this time of the year and this year has been an especially good one.

The most common varieties you see are the American Elder (Sambucus Canadensis) and the Blue Elder (S. glauca). Here in the west Kootenays of British Columbia Canada, we get the blue elderberries but most of you are more familiar with the darker, almost black, American Elderberry.

This recipe is from the 1976 ‘Winemakers’ Recipe Handbook’. Although I found a few elderberry wine recipes online, we ended up going with this one as we wanted to learn and understand using a hydrometer and testing the S.G.

Many people choose to mix elderberries with another fruit to make a blend, a common one being elderberry and blackberry. Many winemakers also use elderberries to add some flavor and color to other wines. We chose to only use elderberries in this recipe to know the base taste of blue elderberries then we can make adjustments as time goes on. 

Notes Before the Recipe

• You need to know the basics of wine making for this recipe. I don’t go into the details of what a primary or secondary vessels is, how to clean and sanitize etc. Here is one link for some basics but please do a little research before diving into fermenting wine yourself as if not done correctly you’ll end up with vinegar or contaminating your batch. We purchased a wine making kit which had all the basic instructions on wine making before we made our first batch.  Here is a wine making for dummies cheat sheet but I highly recommend you read and learn from multiple sources.
• The recipe doesn’t mention ‘topping off’ after racking for the second fermentation stage. You want the wine to be at the base of the neck of the carboy, about 5-8 cm from the top, otherwise there is too much space for oxidation to occur. Many people top off with juice or the same wine, however because we didn’t have any, we chose to make unsweetened elderberry juice as our top off. 
• Some people choose to make a  ‘juice’ and not use any pulp when wine making (which is often heated and will be a different end product). We chose the whole fruit method in a nylon bag as this recipe calls for that. Using a nylon bag skips the messy step of straining the berries for the secondary fermentation stage. I don’t know how this recipe would work with just the juice and without the pulp in the primary stage. Even if you use a cold pressed juice you still benefit from having some pulp in the primary stage for flavour and colour. Read more info here on how different processes affect wine.
• We froze the elderberries before using them. This kills off the wild yeast that’s present on the berries so you have more control of the flavour and fermentation.
• This recipe makes 1 gallon of wine. If you’re using a larger wine vessel then you need to increase everything except the yeast.
• We took S.G measurements for each stage and kept detailed records.
• Every batch of wine will ferment differently depending on sugar levels, yeast, temperature, etc. This recipe is a guideline (for example ours took 6 days before we could rack it, not 5) which is why basic wine making is something you need to know.
• Here are some more recipes for making elderberry wine from Common Sense Homesteading, Here We Are and Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook. We went with the recipe below from a wine making recipe book because this is our first time making wine and it seemed like every post I read online had a different process. Wine making is a learning journey and there are endless ways to do it.

Elderberry Wine (using Fresh or Dried elderberries)