I have a few Sam's club cheap kits (Merlot, supposedly!) and was thinking of adding elderberries to one of them to try and improve results-Plan on adding
35g to the 23 litres.
I know the berroes are normally added to the primary, which woud be 10 days at most, but would there be any value adding them to the secondary instead? That way I could have them in the kit for 6 weeks or so, instead of 10 days. (I can't see me trying to use them in both--after 10 days in a primary they just become part of the lees at the bottom, and I don't want to transfer all that over to the secondary)
One of the main reasons for removing the fruit from the wine after 3 days to a week is so the deteriorating fruit skins and seeds will not add off flavors. What you might do is put them in a mesh bag and suspend them in the carboy. I do not know that I would want fruit must in contact with the wine for 6 weeks.
I use a 6.8 gallon glass carboy with an anti-foaming agent. When I use elderberries, I usually let the primary go for about 2 weeks or so for a bit of extended contact time, and I usually add about 3/4 to 1 full cup of elderberries (50g?). I wonder if the yeasts help break down the berries and extract their colour and flavour. I just assumed that but I'm not absolutely sure. I'm also a bit worried about excessive contact of skins or seeds tainting the flavour in some kind of negative way, but again that's just my intuition but I don't know for sure. I made some red wine vinegar and soaked a lot of elderberries in it for a long time, and not as much elderberry flavour was extracted as I was hoping -- but comparing vinegar to wine is hardly going to be a fair comparison. :)
Another risk may be that there might be some unwanted spoilage in the berries, and adding them to the secondary may introduce this spoilage. However, adding them at the primary, the CO2 and yeast can help kill off the nasties so you don't have a problem there. Then again, as someone else said in this thread, meadmakers often add fruit later too -- but sometimes it's more of a sweet mead with higher alcohol percentages so this may protect the wine better too, or they are careful to pasteurize the fruit beforehand, etc.. which all is a lot more work.
With the way I do it, it seems to come out nicer for me than just adding berries in the first 7 days or so, and is pretty painless in terms of work required. If you're looking for more flavour but using only a 7-10 day primary, personally I'd just add double the amount of berries to the primary rather than try to mess about with the secondary.
LG
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