By Magnus von Kageneck, cellar master (who he is) · Updated: September 2026
At the end of September everything in the hedgerow is ripe at once: sloes, rosehips, elderberries — three fruits, three rules that contradict one another. Only pick with the owner's permission, never in a nature reserve; the so-called small-bunch rule covers personal use.
Why the sloe needs frost
The reason is tannin, not sweetness. A mellow red wine has about 1 g per litre, a more astringent one up to 2.5 g, a ripe, unfrozen sloe 9 to 10 g, depending on the passage in the book. Over-ripeness and frost on the bush cut it roughly in half — the recipe chapter gives under 5 g/l, the freezing chapter 5 to 6 g/l; the acidity drops along with it. That is why you leave them hanging, even if the harvest turns out smaller.
Can the freezer make up for it? Arauner answers tersely: "Unfortunately, this is not possible." (p. 143). On the branch the plant keeps breaking down the tannin and draws the fragments back into its wood; in the freezer this metabolism is at rest.
Crush, don't blend — and press off in time
Washed sloes are crushed or pounded, keeping the stones as whole as possible: the flesh should go into the mash, the stone material should not. Blenders and stick blenders have no business here — for a cherry batch the book sets the mill, for the same reason, so that few stones are broken, because of the hydrocyanic acid.
This determines how long the mash stands. The sloe recipe gives two to three weeks of mash fermentation, four in cool rooms; for stone fruit the book draws a tighter limit elsewhere, and the sloe is a stone fruit: press off after two weeks at the latest, but let it stand for at least eight days. The shorter the fermentation, the less passes from seeds and stones into the wine (amygdalin, hydrocyanic acid); the longer, the more easily the mash presses; the book itself calls this a compromise. There is no need to panic as long as the stones are whole; where the figures diverge, I follow the shorter one and let the young wine finish fermenting somewhere warmer.
The sloe batch
For every 10 litres the book reckons with 5 litres of sloe pulp, i.e. about 6 kg of fruit, plus 2.5 kg of sugar, 4 g of yeast nutrient salt, 20 ml of Antigel (pectolytic enzyme) and a cultured wine yeast, Burgundy or port (see the yeast compass). The order matters: dissolve the sugar in hot water, let the solution cool, only then stir in the nutrient salt, yeast and Antigel — yeast and enzyme cannot take the heat — and finally the fruit pulp.
For 10 litres you need a 20-litre demijohn: the mash rises, half stays as headspace. Fit the airlock straight away, fill it with water, swirl daily. Then press off and measure: it should come to 10 litres; if anything is missing, top up with water, otherwise there is too much sugar in the batch, fermentation becomes sluggish and the wine too sweet. After that it carries on fermenting in a smaller demijohn, as full as possible; the alcohol should reach more than 13% vol.
Rosehip: exactly the other way round
Here the frost rule expressly does not apply: the rosehip may be over-ripe and soft. Rinse it thoroughly several times before processing; I leave out bushes along busy roads — what is inside the tissue does not wash off. Remove stalks and flower ends, then chop only coarsely: halve, quarter, at most blend briefly. The seeds stay whole — destroy them and tannin is released, and pulp that is too fine clears badly.
Low in juice as it is, the fruit only gives up its substances through mash fermentation. The book's recipe for a 10-litre batch: 3 kg fresh rosehips (or 2 kg dried), 2.8 kg sugar, 8.5 l water, 40 g lactic acid 80% (or 30 g citric acid), 4 g yeast nutrient salt, 10 ml Antigel and a cultured wine yeast of the sherry, Malaga or port strain. The hot sugar solution is poured over the chopped fruit; that is the extraction. At 50 to 40 °C the Antigel goes in; only after cooling to 25 to 20 °C do the lactic acid, nutrient salt and yeast follow. Then into the fermentation vessel, again half full, airlock on, ferment at 20 to 25 °C, swirl daily. After two weeks press off and move into a smaller, almost full demijohn: at 20 to 25 °C the alcohol is reached after two to four weeks, at 15 to 20 °C it takes three to six months.
Elder: don't wait — heat
First the species: only black elder, a woody shrub, is used. Dwarf elder is a herbaceous perennial and, according to the book, inedible; red-berried elder is light red even when ripe and unsuitable for juice and wine. The number of branches in the fruit cluster — five in black elder, three in dwarf elder — is cited by the book only as a more recent observation: a hint, not proof. A mix-up is not a flaw in taste: if you cannot identify the species with certainty, don't pick.
The second reason for caution is called sambunigrin, found mainly in unripe green and red berries and in the stalks: raw, it can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. Hence four steps:
- Strip: process on the day of picking, the fruit spoils easily. Strip or comb off the berries; stalks, green and red berries must not go in. The book's recipe for a 10-litre batch: 5 kg berry clusters (i.e. about 4.5 kg of berries), 2.5 kg sugar, 5.5 l water, 40 to 50 g lactic acid 80% (or 30 to 40 g citric acid), 4 g yeast nutrient salt, 10 ml Antigel and a cultured wine yeast of the Burgundy or port strain.
- Heat through: add around 2 litres of the recipe water to the mashed berries, as the book recommends for mash that is low in juice. Then heat right through, don't just bring it briefly up to temperature; the book gives about 85 °C. Raw berries and raw-pressed juice belong neither in the batch nor on the spoon. If in doubt, don't use them; if you feel unwell after eating them, seek medical advice.
- Cool: bring it down to 50 °C, then stir in the Antigel and let it work for 4 to 6 hours; the pectinases cannot take more heat.
- Wait: lactic acid, nutrient salt and yeast only go in at 25 to 20 °C — the same sequence as for the rosehip batch; no yeast survives at 50 °C. Ferment under an airlock at 20 to 25 °C.
Racking, clearing, sulphiting
All three end the same way: after fermentation, keep them cool until the gross lees have settled, then rack the wine off the yeast. The book ties the sulphiting to this racking: 1 g potassium disulphite (metabisulphite) per 10 litres (how to do it cleanly). In sloe wine it keeps, among other things, the red pigments from turning brown; for elder the book gives no reason — and promises no brilliantly clear wine: a trace of opalescence remains.
Sloe wine often does not clear by itself: the tannin that helps it keep also stabilises the haze, and a lot of it even inhibits fermentation. The second cause is undegraded pectin — after steam juicing or pouring boiling water over the fruit, the pectinases are destroyed. That is why the pectinase comes first: per 10 litres around 20 ml Antigel, plus 10 ml silica sol 15% and 2 to 6 g gelatine depending on how cloudy it is. The gelatine binds the tannin, the silica sol drags the flakes to the bottom; on its own it does not precipitate tannin.
Antigel and silica sol are simply added, the gelatine is not: cover it with water, let it swell for ten to twenty hours, warm it to 38 to 40 °C while stirring and add it warm; then mix all the agents in thoroughly. If you work plant-based, use Mostklar V (plant-based fining agent) instead of gelatine; with rosehip wine the cause is more likely the overly fine pulp, for which the book names agar-agar (more on clearing). Sloe wine is made sweet, back-sweetened cold with 20 to 50 g of sugar per litre; tannic and dry at the same time makes for poor drinking. Without a bush to hand there is concentrate, for example the sloe concentrate.
Safety note: potassium disulphite and lactic acid are hazardous substances; the signal word, pictogram, and hazard (H) and precautionary (P) statements are given on the product page and the packaging. The label of the product delivered is what counts, including for Antigel and gelatine — not any figure from the book or the article.
Source: Kitzinger Weinbuch, revised edition 1999, Paul Arauner GmbH & Co. KG, Kitzingen — sloe pp. 143 f., rosehip pp. 111 ff., elder pp. 115 ff., stone fruit pp. 56 f., freezing p. 15, gelatine p. 170. Arauner, Kitzinger and Joenos are third-party trademarks.
Magnus von Kageneck is Maischewerk's cellar-master character. The texts in this series are written with the support of artificial intelligence and are checked for technical accuracy before publication.
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