Elderflower Mead Wine Recipe: The One Wine Recipe I WISH I Had Included in My Book!

easy home winemaking

This is a recipe that you will not find in my book, Winemaking Made Easy: How to Make Easy Homemade Wine from Grapes, Fruit, & More. And that’s sad, because it’s become my new favorite.

I covet it. I share it only with those I like best, or those who I owe a sizable favor to. Selfish of me? Only for the time being—I didn’t know I would love this wine quite so much. No worries—I’m working on a new (bigger) batch, so that I can be a good human again.

If Elderflower Mead is So Great, then Why…?

This naturally begs the question, if this Elderflower Mead Wine Recipe is really that great, then why would I leave it out of my book?

Local Raw Honey - Homegrown Honey

Simple. I just hadn’t made it when I’d published the book.

I’d played with Elderflower Wine before, but not as a mead (technically a melomel, or perhaps a metheglin, depending on whether you consider elderflower an herb…I’ll leave the semantics to you).

After I finally completed the book and started playing with some new varieties of wine, with my now-adult son taking an interest (and he a beekeeper with a piqued interest in meads in particular), we decided to try an elderflower mead. It wasn’t something I’d done or had finished in time to include in the wine book, but it has since been completed and consumed, completely; with a second (larger) batch quickly fermenting on the heels of the first, very missed, elderflower mead.

How to Make Easy Elderflower Mead (Elderflower Honey Wine)

If you want to make this so, so simple homemade elderflower honey wine (and I really HIGHLY recommend that you do), you’ll first need my original Mead Recipe found in Wine Making Made Easy, which you can purchase securely at Amazon. It’s available for Kindle or in Paperback by clicking on the title.

From there, go to the recipe for Basic Mead. You will find it in one-, three-, and five-gallon recipes. Choose the quantity you want to make, and for each gallon add two cups of dried elderflower.

How to make Elderflower Mead

1. Get the Basic Mead Recipe (Honey Wine recipe) In Wine Making Made Easy.

2. To that recipe, add 2 cups dried elderflower for every gallon of elderflower mead you are making (or 4 cups fresh elderflower when available).

3. Complete the rest of the recipe as instructed, but be sure to strain out the solid elderflowers after about 7 days.

Where to Buy Dried Elderflower

You can buy dried elderflower easily in bulk on Amazon—click this link for the source I use, an economical, high quality dried elderflower that I use both for elderflower wine and for elderberry and elderflower tea recipes. When in season, you can also use fresh elderflowers (actually I recommend it, but it’s a bit of a limited season, can be difficult to find the flowers in great enough quantity, and it’s so hard to wait—I make some elderflower wine and elderflower mead from fresh flowers while in season and some from dried elderflower during winter and the rest of the year and in fact if my fresh supply is running a little short, I add a bit more dried elderflower to make up the difference).

What Does Elderflower Mead Taste Like?

If you’ve ever had one of the popular elderflower liqueurs (like St. Germain or St. Elder), or if you’ve been lucky enough to have made your own infused elderflower liqueur from some great elderflower liqueur recipe you’ve found, you’ll recognize Elderflower Mead as being quite a lot like that. It’s pleasantly sweet, but not too sweet, with a delightful nose of elderflowers, often described as having a “Muscat” taste similar to Moscato wine. I swear it’s worth making the wine just to breathe in its delicious scent!

elder flower, elderflower for mead or elderflower tea

Though I’ve thus far only enjoyed this as a wine, I’ve imagined many times that it would also make a delicious wine spritzer with a little plain seltzer water—something to look forward to this summer with a little ice and warm sunshine! In fact, I think it’s time to start another batch of my favorite Elderflower Mead now, so I’ll still have some left for summer spritzing!

If you make this elderflower mead, I’ll be eager to hear about your adventure—please come back to share how your wine turned out!

>> Don’t forget, you’ll need the Mead recipe first—click here to get it.

>> Here is my go-to source to buy dried elderflower.

>> Here’s a handy link to the yeast I use to make this elderflower wine.

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Winter Winemaking for Easy, Enjoyable Homemade Wines

We usually think of home winemaking as a summer or early fall project, primarily because that is the time of year when grapes, berries, fruit, and other country winemaking crops are being harvested. But the warmer months are certainly not the only time of year right for making homemade wine. In fact, for many of us, winter is a far better time for making simple, delicious country wines at home.

–> Make wine in winter when you have the TIME!
–> Frozen fruits and berries are excellent, easy winter winemakers.
–> Meads, metheglins, and melomels can be made fresh at any time of the year.

Why is Winemaking in Winter Better?

To be sure, winemaking is a great hobby any time of the year, and in-season when the produce is fresh can turn out some outstanding wine. But making wine in the winter is better for one major reason: In winter, we have time.

There’s really nothing like a good homegrown or locally-sourced crop of fruit or berries. The ripeness, the freshness, the variety, the flavor…it just can’t be beat. Even when preserved, these are characteristics that come through in your product. The fact that local and homegrown produce goes from vine to freezer (or whatever your preservation method of choice may be), means that the produce experiences less stress and degradation in its “travel” to you.

The problem that many of us have is that time is a very in-demand commodity in the warm months. Vacations, activities, pressing preserving of fruits and crops, so many other landscape and maintenance issues that demand our attention…it all adds up to finding yourself with many great options, the best of intentions, but only so much a body can do. Sometimes, something has to give.

In winter, though, we slow down. Sure, time is still a precious resource, but we seem to have more of it. Frankly, at this time of year we are more apt to want to spend it inside on a project of interest. And so, winter can be the perfect time to take on something like making easy, simple wines we can enjoy in just a few months and throughout the coming year.

What Produce is Best for Making Wine in Winter?

What holds a lot of people back from making wine in winter is that we think wine must be made with fresh fruit and produce. This really is not at all true. Yes, there are tastes and nuances that can only result from making wine with a product that just came out of the patch or vineyard, but there are also benefits to making wine from fresh-frozen, preserved fruits and berries:

  • Frozen produce is often higher in quality if it has been quickly prepped and preserved, especially as opposed to summer produce that has had to sit and wait for us to have the time to deal with it, and perhaps experienced a loss of quality in the meantime.
  • Frozen fruit can be easier to handle, because the freezing and thawing process actually does a lot of the work of crushing and preparing the produce for you.
  • Frozen fruit and produce, whether your own fresh-frozen harvest or frozen purchased at a local grocer, is already prepped, peeled, cleaned, and ready to go, making short work of putting a batch of homemade wine together.
  • Good fruit is readily available in both fresh and frozen forms at local grocery stores throughout the winter months.
  • With the variety of produce available through good grocers, you can make wine out of all sorts of fruit and produce, including some that you might not otherwise be able to grow or access locally.

More Than Just Fruit Wine

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that winter winemaking is limited to only frozen fruits, though. Many things are excellent winter winemakers; top of the list is, in fact, one of the easiest possible things you can make wine from, straight from Mother Nature’s most ambitious of helpers:

Homegrown Honey for wine

Honey is PERFECT for Winter Winemaking!

• Honey! Mead is wine made from honey and is quite possibly the BEST ingredient to make real, natural wine in the winter, solely for the reason that there is no difference between fresh-harvested honey or honey you tap a month or two or three later. Mead (honey wine) can be made very sweet or just barely so, and so can easily be made to your own taste when you make your own.
• Flavored meads are also perfect for winter winemaking. Technically called melomels (mead flavored with fruit) or metheglins (herbed/spiced meads), nicely-balanced flavored meads can be made with ingredients such as dried elderberry or elderflower, citrus, spices, apples, berries, or other frozen or fresh fruits of virtually any imaginable variety.
• Frozen or preserved fruit juices you may have put up earlier in the year are also ideal for making wine in the winter. Maybe you put a little something aside to enjoy later? Or prepped some juice that you never had time to make into jelly? That juice is just the perfect thing to make a homemade wine with!

What Other Options are there for Winter Winemaking?

But wait, there’s more!

Yes, there are still other products and ingredients that you can use for winemaking in the off-season. These are ingredients you can find readily either at your local grocery store or through winemaking suppliers, online and off:

• Juice from concentrate. Yes, you can actually make some fun homemade wines with frozen juice concentrate from the freezer section of your grocery store.
• Vintners juice. Vintners’ juice is concentrated fruit juice designed for winemaking. It is sold in bulk sizes ideal for making wine at home, and is a perfect base for making wine in the winter. You can add fresh or dried fruits or berries to vintner’s juice to make a more robust and flavorful wine, or you can simply add ingredients to the juice to ferment it.
• Rehydrated dried fruit and juice. Similar to how you might rehydrate a dried fruit or berry for cooking or juice-making (such as for elderberry syrup from dehydrated fruit), you can make a juice from dried fruit or berries and then add the necessary ingredients to ferment that juice into wine. It’s a fair option that works best for smaller batches (around one gallon). The juice can benefit from further flavoring by adding more dried ingredient into the batch when preparing for the first fermentation.

Is Making Homemade Wine Hard?

In a word? No. But it’s easy to see why home winemaking has that reputation.

The reason?

Winemaking has entered into some very scientific fields, both commercially and for home winemakers. But the truth is that it does not need to be as complicated as it often is. It is very possible to take home winemaking back to the basics the way many generations did before us—before all the added sulfites, preservatives, and chemical profiling. You just need a good resource that steps back from the “rules” of today, and gets you back to good, basic home wine making.

easy home winemaking

There are many good resources online, and a few good books on the subject. In Wine Making Made Easy: How to Make Easy Homemade Wines from Grapes, Fruit & More, you will find instructions and recipes for cheap, easy home winemaking without over-investing in equipment, and without getting overwhelmed with the process (in fact, much or all of what you need you may already have at home!). It’s good, honest home winemaking, taken back to the basics for good, honest, cleaner, preservative-free wine.

Pick up a copy today, and enjoy your new winter winemaking hobby!

New Release: Wine Making Made Easy

Here we go again, but a bit of a different path this time!

Once again, I’ve set off to share easier, more simplified, more doable ways to enjoy homemade goods and bring back some of that solid country homesteading knowledge. This time, it’s winemaking at home–easy country winemaking without all the modern chemistry and fuss.

ORDER Your Copy NOW! Paperback or Kindle

Wine Making Made Easy: How to Make Easy Homemade Wine from Grapes, Fruit, & More by Mary Ellen Ward

Winemaking is so complicated! …Or is it?

Home wine making used to be simple. And now it is again!

Our grandparents, and generations of grandparents before them, made excellent wines with minimal fuss, minimal equipment, and no added sulfites or additives. They made them not just from grapes but from all manner of available fruits, berries, honey, and other produce. They didn’t spend a lot of money. They didn’t overwhelm themselves with minuscule measurements and chemistry. They didn’t dwindle down the savings to buy pricey containers for fermenting or for storing. They made wine in tune with the rhythms of nature, with basic equipment.

They made Good. Simple. Cheap. Easy. Homemade Wine!

If you’ve always wanted to make wine but thought the process or investment was beyond you, this is the book for you. This is the book that takes winemaking back to its roots. The no-fuss, no-frills method of wine making that uses everyday equipment you can buy right downtown. This simplified and basic process uses no added preservatives, sulfites, or unrecognizable ingredients. Just good, clean, wine-making for good, clean, fun-making wine!

Amazon.com

Available Now in Paperback and Kindle Versions

Copies are now available at Amazon.com. This is the book for all of you who have thought about making fun, tasty wines at home, but were always a bit scared of the prospect. We’re taking it back to the basics here. We’re taking the fear out of it–and the EXPENSE, too! Order your copy today!

P.S. These are great books for holiday gift-giving!

P.P.S. This isn’t just a book for the summer growing season! Find out how to make wines in the off-season (when you have more time!?) with frozen fruits, honey, vintner’s juices, and more.

P.P.P.S. Enjoy, and Many Thanks!

Get your copy here: Paperback or Kindle.