For batch 2 we did not have enough elderberries so topped up with a bit of foraging through the deep freeze – blackberries, raspberries, rosehips and sloes. I’m thinking the sloes might have been a mistake.
The first batch is bottled.
Update: 15/3/21: When we first made the wine, the hydrometer reading was 1.3, which it said was too low for wine. But by then it was too late to add sugar. So today we emptied the flask into a bucket, leaving a lot of the sludge behind. Added 200g of sugar before returning it to the cleaned flagon.
It seems the sludge is not only settled out bits of fruit, but it was also almost all of the yeast. The wine is now very inactive, but the fermentation expert says we have to let the yeast multiply up again. The fact that there is any activity means that it will recover. It is currently bubbling every 6 minutes.