Elderberry wine with no elderberries?

[Williamhawk]

Hello,

Is it possible to make a passable elderberry wine from concentrate? Or perhaps dried berries? Elderberry jelly is our absolute favorite and I have a hankering to try making perhaps a 3 gal batch of elderberry wine. Unfortunately, it is too late for actual berries here and the small bag of frozen juice I have is nowhere near enough for wine.

So, I ordered a gallon of Vintner's Best Elderberry Fruit Wine Base. It is billed as real juice and most of the big online stores carry it, so it must be ok, right? Has anyone tried it? Is it really ok? Mine arrived and I'm a little concerned that elderberry is not in first, second or even third place on the ingredients list. It is behind corn syrup, apple and pear juice concentrates and followed by grape juice concentrate.

Is this enough elderberry to be worthy of the name, not to mention tying up one of my carboys for a year? People who make elderberry wine from fruit seem to use a lot more berries that seems like is in this and I don't want to waste my time on something that will be a generic fruit wine with a hint of elderberry. The gallon claims to make 5 gal. of wine but I was planning to reduce that. Still, I'm concerned this is not going to be good. I have not opened the container to smell and taste, but the ingredients list worries me.


I didn't find the right solution from the internet.
References:

https://www.winemakingtalk.com/threads/ ... ies.57852/

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[Dejmos]

Hello,

Such kind of wine is not a common drink in our country. So my advices are pure hypothetic.

First - the ingredients of the juice. Almost every juice made from rare, expensive or low moisture fruits is mixed with some other fruit juise, grape and apple are the most used.
It seems your juise is the same. You will make a fruit wine, not pure elderberry wine. This doesn't mean that the wine won't be good.
You can strengthen the taste using the frozen juise you already have. Or you can add dried elderberries in the batch (boil them to sterilize them). I'm not sure if you can use the jelly you have mentioned.

Second - be sure that the juise producer didn't add any preservatives in it. Otherwise you won't be able to start the fermentation.

I hope I've helped you.