I started this wine on June 1st. The recipe was based on one I found on a homebrew forum.

Ingredients

elderflowers: 2 handfuls
white grape juice: 1 litre
apple juice: 1 litre
sugar: 500g
lemon juice: 2 tbs
tea: 1 bag
pectin enzyme: 1tsp
bakers yeast: 1tsp
yeast nutrient: 1tsp

The juice was simply cheap supermarket cartons of 'shelf juice' rather than fresh unpasteurised 'fridge juice'.

Method

1. Remove and discard the stalks from the flowers.

2. Put the elderflowers in a fermenting bucket and pour over a couple of pints of boiling water. Add a crushed campden tablet and leave for 48 hours, stirring occasionally.

3. Strain the elderflower water into a demijohn. Add the juice and a cold cup of tea (no milk!).

4. Dissolve the sugar in boiling water and add to the demijohn when it has cooled a bit.

5. Add the enzyme, yeast and nutrient and leave to ferment.

6. When it has finished fermenting, optionally clear with finings and rack into a clean demijohn. If a still wine is desired, add a campden tablet and stabiliser.

7. (Optional) To make a sparkling wine, do not add stabiliser. Syphon into pressure bottles (e.g. plastic 1 litre lemonade bottles). Add 1 tsp sugar and a small amount of an active yeast starter. Keep in a warm room for a couple of weeks then store somewhere cool to mature.

Tasting notes

Serve chilled, this is the nicest white wine I've made so far. The flavour is light and refreshing. I attempted to make a sparkling wine by following step 7. The bottles pressurised but the resulting wine wasn't fizzy. The wine still tasted good so I consider the experiment to be a success. I still have some elderflowers in the freezer so I might try again but add slightly more sugar and yeast in step 7.

The recipe only used 500g of sugar because I was aiming for a sparkling wine with a low-ish alcohol content of around 9%. For a more traditional still wine, a higher alcohol content might be preferred so increasing the sugar content to 750g would increase the alcohol to 13-14%.