Elderflower Champagne Recipe (high alcohol)

An easy high-alcohol elderflower champagne recipe including foraging tips and step-by-step fermentation instructions. Elderflower champagne is a lightly fizzy drink that tastes of fragrant elderflowers with a sweet citrus kick. What makes this recipe different from others is that it goes through the initial fermentation and then is fermented for even longer in a demi-john. This makes it more alcoholic than other recipes.

Although rare to find on any menu, you can make it yourself in early summer using freshly foraged elderflowers and a few other ingredients. Intrigued? Let me show you how with my tried and tested elderflower champagne recipe. It’s relatively simple and up there with the best homemade wines you can make.

Champagne doesn’t tend to be something that you think you can whip up in your kitchen. It’s more the type of drink that you buy for special occasions and always in professionally corked bottles. If you’re up for a creative and delicious project, then wipe those misconceptions away because it’s perfectly doable to make sparkling wines at home.

Homemade Country Wine

Country wines can be made from all types of fruit, berries, herbs, edible flowers, and even some vegetables. Depending on the yeast, technique, and amount of sugar left in the wine, you can make sweet or dry wine and still or sparkling. Making wine is also a great way to save money – I worked out the costs some time ago, and based on the ingredients, homemade elderflower champagne costs less than a dollar per bottle to make.

If you’ve not tried elderflower champagne before, you’re in for a real treat. It’s sweet, like a dessert wine, with a refreshing lemonade-like taste. Once you’ve made it the first time, I guarantee it will become an annual wild food foraging tradition. Elderflowers are the most essential flavor ingredient for elderflower champagne, and you can make it with fresh or dried flowers. Fresh is best, but if you’re in an area where elder trees don’t grow or you want to make it out of season, then go ahead and use dried.

Once you’ve made elderflower champagne, store it in plastic bottles. Glass can explode with the sparkling wine fizz, but if you use empty and clean soft drink bottles, you won’t have to worry about this. Make a mental note to save a few two-liter bottles before it’s bottling time. This recipe takes a couple of weeks to make, and in the end, you’ll have about six bottles of homemade elderflower champagne to enjoy! It’s best served chilled and accompanied by summer sunshine.

Identifying Elderflowers

At this moment, in early June, I can see creamy umbels of elderflowers blooming in our native hedgerow. It was one of the first things we planted when we bought our home, and it is filled with shrubs that produce flowers, fruit, and nuts for both local wildlife and us. That makes it very easy for me to head outside and pick flowers to use in this elderflower champagne recipe! If you have the opportunity and space to grow elder trees, I strongly encourage you to do so. Not just for convenience but because foraging from your own garden is more sustainable than picking wild plants from the wild. You’ll also be more assured that the elderflowers you’re picking are indeed elderflowers.

Don’t feel put off if you don’t have elder growing at your fingertips! They’re very easy to identify and can be foraged sustainably from public places. That includes along roads, public footpaths, and the edges of fields. I live in Britain, and the native elder tree is the Black Elder Sambucus nigra, a common shrub-like tree. It can grow to about twenty feet tall and wide and has pinnate leaves of five to seven oval leaflets. The leaves are also pointed and have toothed edges. This species has a wide range, and you can find it all across Europe and even a small part of North Africa. There are also cultivated elders, such as the pink-flowered Sambucus ‘Black Beauty’ that you can use to make pink elderflower champagne.

Elderflowers in the USA and Canada

The elder trees you pick elderflowers from in North America are sub-species of Sambucus nigra, and include the Common Elderberry or American Elder Sambucus nigra L. ssp. canadensis (syn Sambucus canadensis). It’s often smaller than Black Elder, growing to only about ten feet tall, but has similar leaves and flowers. The leaves are longer and thinner, but the flowers are the same in look, smell, and use. They also grow in similar habitats – at the edges of woodland and roadsides.

Harvesting Elderflowers

Elderflowers bloom from late spring to early summer, depending on how far north you are. Where I live, they bloom in late May to mid-June, but I once saw them blooming in Italy in early April. They’re very distinctive and so sweet-smelling that it would be difficult to mistake them for anything else. Rowan flowers look very similar, but they bloom earlier and lack the incredible fragrance. They’re not toxic, and I’ll be honest – when I first started foraging, I mistook them for elderflowers! I actually made wine with them, and though it was boozy, it tasted terrible. I laugh at that memory and have learned. The aroma of elderflowers is unmistakable and is what gives elderflower cordial and elderflower champagne its delicious flavor.

Once you’ve found elderflowers, pick them in late morning, ideally on the day you begin making elderflower champagne. The weather should be calm and clear, and you shouldn’t take too many flowers from any tree. The flowers turn into elderberries later in the year, and you want to leave enough for wildlife to eat and yourself! Pluck entire umbels, snapping them with your fingers on the main stem, and place them in a bag to take home. You’ll need ten to twenty full flowerheads to make the recipe. You can either take them home to make elderflower champagne that same day, or you can dry the flowers on a drying rack or in a food dehydrator to make a batch later in the summer.

Don’t Wash the Elderflowers

When you get home, spread the flowers on a cloth in the shade and leave them there for an hour. This helps any insects that might have hitched a ride to make their escape. Do not wash the elderflowers, either. You’ll wash the aroma from them rather than any perceived ‘dirtiness.’ Nature is not dirty, so if you pick flowers above dog leg lift area and they look clean, they are fine to use unwashed. Since this recipe uses specialty sparkling wine yeast, you don’t need to rely on the wild yeasts on the flowers. However, if you were making elderflower champagne and trying to use wild yeast, that’s another reason not to wash the flowers. Washing can remove the wild yeasts from the flowers.

More Elderflower and Drink Recipes

• Elderflower Cordial Recipe
• Rhubarb Wine Recipe
• Elderflower & Vanilla Jelly Recipe
• Kahlua Coffee Liqueur Recipe