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1st time......elderberry wine precipitation/contamination?
Today at 6:51pm Mark & Quote Quote Modify Remove
Hi, I am brand new to this forum and hope someone can shed some light on a problem I have just discovered.
I made bramble and elderberry wine this autumn (first attempt at winemaking) and (I think) I was as sterile as I possibly could be, however my wine is now bottled and when I looked at it the other night I noticed dark flecks through floating through the wine. I am positive it went into the bottles clear and certainly I would have noticed this at the time if they had been present.
I can't find anything by googling apart from flowers of wine (which are white, right)_ - I don't think this is the problem as it is through the wine (not on the surface) and the flecks are dark. On pouring some into a glass to look more closely, they look like (if anything) small fleck of lees. Is this possible? I kept the siphon tube well away fro mthe bottom of the demi john.

Any advice is much appreciated....I am hoping the whole lot isn't ruined as I have 11 bottles and was looking forward to this.

Hi and welcome Jenny .

I'll virtually guarantee that nothing is ruined and your wine will be a bit on the tasty side. What you're seeing is fairly common with elderberry and nothing to worry about, although it normally takes a lot longer to happen. Either this or you weren't as careful as you thought when you were racking the wine out of the demijohn - but that's still nothing to worry about. It's very probably tannin deposition - elderberries have an awful lot of tannin. Get a tiny bit of tannin coming out of solution and everything and its granny clings to it, giving you bits floating around which look for all the world like little flecks (now where have I heard that before? )

No problem at all - trust your nose and your tongue. Open a bottle and sniff. If it smells OK, it's 99% certain that it is OK. Then have a sip. If it tastes OK, that's the other 1% taken care of. It may be a bit rough, but that's normal in a young elderberry - on the other hand, mixing them with blackberries softens that roughness and, if you have got a tannin deposition it'll be even less rough.

I tend to drink elderberry and blackberry within a month of bottling (what am I saying - within a month of the point at which I would bottle if I could be bothered!!!).

Oh - the solution - do nothing until you want to drink it. At that point, decant it gently through a layer of muslin. Problem solved.

Mike

thanks so much .....that's set my mind at rest.

Can I ask then, have you made Elderberry & Bramble wine? How long roughly speaking did you leave it from end of fermentation to bottling/drinking? I am getting some confusing advice from different sources and one person has just told me I have bottled too early and that I should have left it 6-12 months in demijohns before bottling. Other books say leave for 1 year after bottling before tasting. Hmmmm, not sure I can wait that long.....especially since it tasted not TOO bad on the last racking.

Wow - so many questions in a couple of sentences!!

OK - here we go.

As long as the fermentation has definitely ended, there are no hard and fast rules on bottling - but there are a few guidelines. The principal one is that any wine will mature more efficiently in bulk - so a barrel will mature quicker than a 5-gallon fermenter which will mature quicker than a demijohn which will mature quicker than a bottle. It's my opinion - but only an opinion - that very little will happen in a bottle apart from tannin deposition, which you appear to have already found out about. On the other hand, I rarely bottle anything these days. So yes - I would say that the longer you leave it in the demijohn after racking it off the deposit, the better. And then, having said that, there are some lighter wines which will actually deteriorate if you leave them in the demijohn for more than a couple of weeks. It's suck it and see, then, which is all part of the joy of winemaking - but generally speaking, the heavier the wine (ie the more ingredients you use) the more the wine will benefit from bulk maturation.

But then you have to decide what this "benefit" may be - and that's a very personal thing. I like young wines. I like lots of tannin. I may be odd - I don't know or, for that matter, care because it's my wine and I'll make it as I damn well please (and so should you). To be frank, I'm not a great believer in the development of fine bouquets in wine, because I don't make them to sniff them. But it's the bouquet which is the main recipient of the benefits of maturation.

Elderberries are very heavy in tannin and, if you make a pure elderberry wine, you may find it far too astringent to drink young (and even I have to admit that a three-year-old elderberry is far superior to a new one). But I'm not famous for my patience. Knowing, then, that I want to drink my wine as soon as possible, I generally mix my elderberries with blackberries - half and half is the aim, but nothing's hard and fast.

So - how long should you leave it? I think that you're doing exactly the right thing - taste it as soon as it's feasible and make a judgement then and there. If it's to your taste, drink it. If it's on the rough side, leave it - but taste it at three-monthly intervals. After a bit of experience, you'll develop a "taste-databank" which will give you a very good idea about when your wine will reach its peak. In the meantime, you'll have a lot of fun. Oh - not everything will turn out well, but complete failures are few and far between. Even your rough-as-old-boots wine can taste very nice with a bit of lemonade added, or a shot of Ribena etc etc etc.

I remember all the conflicting advice. I even went as far as to follow it in my younger days - and often ruined a perfectly good wine by leaving it too long because that's what the book said. Right - to answer your question ... "How long roughly speaking did you leave it from end of fermentation to bottling/drinking?" About a month. Never more than three months - because I now tailor all recipes to make sure that they "mature" quickly. You'll soon learn how to do that.

Mike

:) thanks.Sorry for all the questions!
I must admit though, I like your thinking!

Can't wait to try it now. :) I also have apple & pear and quince & pear batches going.........making the most of the old fruit trees in our new garden.

Jenny, welcome to Ish

Mike

MKG wrote:I'm not famous for my patience.

- never!

Well, Job and I wouldn't have seen eye to eye.

Mike