So Many Elderflowers, So Little Time

Today, I probably spent upwards of four and a half hours working with elderflowers: harvesting, shucking, and starting a batch of elderflower wine.

When I say "shucking," I mean the process of removing the tiny elderflower blossoms from their stems. The stems are quite bitter and, according to Wikipedia, contain cyanide... so we try to avoid them. Shucking is an activity best done with several people and AC/DC playing on the radio.

Or, as the case was this evening, while listening to Dean give a wine tasting to some tipsy people who were conducting a winery tour in the region. One guy was making meowing noises to the cat while the inebriated lady on the end said things like, "Which one is this? I hate this one! I need to remember this one, I like it so much! I'll be quiet now! Ooh, a puppy! Come here, puppy! She has grey whiskers, is she old?" as Brian, Autumn and I silently guffawed into our elderflower blossoms.

The elderflower isn't really worth a whole lot by itself, but Susan and Dean have managed to whip up an entire array of value-added elderflower products: wines, cordial, tea, and jelly among them. Speaking of which, I made some elderflower jelly the other day, with some blossoms sprinkled in.

Look how pretty!

The best part, of course, is that I took that picture and uploaded it to Picasa from my phone. Ain't technology a wonderful thing?

It's an Elderberry Jamboree!

Jams and jellies are some of the top sellers at the Charlottesville Farmer's Market for Dean and Susan. So, we make a lot of it. Right now, we mostly focus on elderberry products, since they have a lot of them frozen from last year, and other berries like raspberries and blackberries have a couple months to go before they'll be fruiting. Right now, we're making elderberry jam, jelly and syrup once a week.

So with the help of my lovely co-intern Autumn, I will demonstrate the art of making elderberry jam.

We start with several pounds of frozen elderberries...

...which we put into the steam kettle. 

Once the elderberries have thawed out and started to bubble a bit, we add in the extras: citric acid, fruit pectin (helps it gel*), and sugar. Five pounds of sugar, to be exact.

Once the mixture gets up to 200 degrees F, it's time to bring out the jars. We wash the jars ahead of time, and stick them in the oven on low heat to dry them.

The handle on the side of the steam kettle tips it forward...

...and with the help of our trusty canning funnel, we prevent spillage. (Most of the time.)

After the lids go on, we turn the jars upside down for fifteen minutes or so to seal them. We usually get about fifteen jars of jam out of one batch.

And that is the story of our delicious elderberry jam! Great on toast. Or on a spoon.



*There's something about elderberries that doesn't like to gel, so we have to add more pectin than with other berries. The jam is usually a little gloopy as a result.

Pick Me, Squeeze Me, Wine Me - The Amazing, Alluring Elderberry

My love affair with wine goes way back. Perhaps not quite to “knee high to a pig’s eye” stage, but I can remember sipping my mother’s White Zinfandel at the tender age of ten – under her supervision, of course. Around the same time, my dad taught me the basics of wine tasting (sniff, swirl, gaze, taste, rinse, repeat…), which allowed me to wow adults at gatherings who were astonished at my alcoholic savant-ness.

Elderflower wine, freshly bottled by yours truly

Despite this promising beginning, I would not call myself a wine aficionado.  In fact, I don’t even know some of the most rudimentary basics about wine. But I have never allowed this to stop me from appreciating what I consider to be a decent glass of fermented grapes. In fact, in some ways I think my ignorance has freed me from the fetters of the pretension and arrogance of wine appreciation. I like a wine because I like it, not because I’m supposed to. And if a wine I like isn’t quality enough for someone with more discerning tastes, that’s just fine. More for me.

That being said – Brightwood Vineyard and Farm is also a winery. They are even listed in the 2011 Virginia Winery Guide, a move that has already garnered them some attention from consumers who apparently memorize said guide every year. (“Hi, I saw your winery listed in this year’s guide, and you weren’t there last year!”)

Susan and Dean’s winery operation is small, to be sure, and is quite unusual – although they grow grapes, they currently don’t grow enough to make wine. They make wine primarily from other berries and fruits, all of which are either grown here on the farm, or come from their neighbors when there is a surplus. Dean calls it “wine your grandmother made” – mulberry, pear, peach, blackberry, and so forth. But their biggest contributor is the elderberry plant.

Yeasty sediment in some racked elderberry wine

Dean actually uses two parts of the elderberry to make wine – the berry and the flower. Dry elderberry wine is comparable to a good Cabernet Sauvignon, and if you are untutored and/or don’t have a glass of the real deal nearby, it would be quite easy to mistake it for one.

Full-strength elderberry wine is a teensy bit too hard-core for a lot of people, however, so Dean prepares several versions of it. Of the dry wine, he makes rosè, middling, and full-on. More popular, though, is the sweetened elderberry wine. There is also elderflower wine, made from the blossoms of the plant in almost exactly the same way you make it from the fruit. Unsweetened, it tastes a bit… well… flowery. Kind of like liquid honeysuckle, I thought. But he also makes a sweetened version with brown sugar that resembles port or cordial, and is fabulous as a dessert wine or an accompaniment to some good cheese.

I learned much of this today – as well as getting a general overview of the wine making process – as I helped Dean rack* and bottle a few different wines. I also got plenty of experience in washing and sterilizing the accouterments of wine making, which are many.

Dean demonstrates how to siphon wine

Mostly, I got a fabulous view of what happens to wine after it is racked for the first time. With Dean’s guidance, I helped re-rack two carboys** of rosè and medium-strength elderberry wine (one each); sweeten a demijohn of elderberry wine and rack it into three carboys, a gallon jug and a very large wine bottle; and bottle a carboy of the brown sugar sweetened elderflower wine. I also got to heat-seal aluminum caps on all the bottled wine, only slightly singeing myself in the process.

And to put a finishing touch on the day, a cottage guest*** came to visit the basement winery…and she happens to be designing part of an exhibit on wine for the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Perhaps Dean and Susan will be able to play a part in that exciting saga…who knows?!

Sweet elderberry wine, ready for bottling

*Rack (verb): to put wine into a containment vessel for storage and continued fermentation. I made this definition up, but basically you rack wine for several months before you bottle it.

**Carboy (noun): A three- to six-gallon jug. Another useful vocab word is demijohn (a 15-gallon jug).

***The farm also has a cottage that they run as a B&B sort of deal.