How to make Elderflower champagne
Elder flowers
Wine is easy to make, and the recipe for elderflower wine, or champagne, is doubly-simple. Right now, at the height of summer, the hedgerows are heavy with the creamy white heads of the elder flower, ripe for picking and brewing.
There are countless variations on the recipe for elderflower wine, so we averaged several to formulate our own brew, which should hopefully bring the best of each to the bottle.
We had 15 three-quarter litre (750ml) bottles, so picked 20 heads of flowers and mixed them with 2.1kg of sugar, the squeezed juice and chipped skins of six lemons, six tablespoons of cheap white wine and 12 pints of water, of which the first two pints were hot and the remainder cold.
We put them all into the same fermenter we used to make the beer, mixed it up and snapped on the lid so it could ferment in peace.
The elderflower wine mixture in the fermenter
It didn’t go quite as quick as we’d expected. That was Saturday, yet by this morning – Monday – very little seemed to have happened. The liquid was still clear and it didn’t smell much different to the way it did when we put it in.
So we mixed up a tablespoon of bakers’ yeast with sugar and hot water and left it to prove, then mixed it in with the liquid and left it alone while we went off to work. By the time we got home tonight, things had taken a definite turn for the better. The liquid was cloudy, it all smelt a lot stronger, and there was a gently tink-tink-tink as gasses fizzed to the top.
We’ll leave it in there for another day before we set about bottling it, and then must leave it for at least a fortnight before we uncork the first one for drinking. If it’s a success, though, I can see us doing a second batch before the elder flowers have all disappeared from the trees. That way we should have enough to see us through the year.
Elder flowers on the tree. The head on the left is in full bloom. The one on the right has yet to open.
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