13 years ago I was last in the Crimea the Crimea is the peninsula off the southern coast of the Ukraine and more recently it's been stolen by the Russians but when I was in the Crimea one of the things that we found was that there was a lot of red champagne for sale now it's a wine it's a great growing area and it's the grapes with a very high sugar content so they tend to produce a lot of sweet wines and champagnes which aren't really sold in the West because we prefer our wines to be dry but when I was there I thought to myself these this red champagne is rather nice and I think it's worth trying out making some at home not from grapes because up here in the northeast of England we don't have enough of the Sun to grow sufficient quantity of sweet grapes but we've got to berries in particular which we could use as an alternative with our elderberries and blackberries so having made elderflower champagne in the past I'm going to adapt my recipe and try my hand at making red champagne these are elderberries and growing next to our allotment and they are in absolute abundance in the towards the end of August and early September absolutely mountains of them so they make great wine and I'm going to pick the book out of these so the second food going in on our blackberries and these like the elder grow in huge abundance brambles or blackberries will grow just about anywhere and they will take over land so these berries are always ripening from about mid-august onwards sometimes earlier they're going to go into the red champagne as well back home now so we have one bucket of elderberries on their stalks and in this mainly BlackBerry's Butterfield under berries on stalks as well if you've got a fruit press then you can skip the next stage which is to strip the berries from their stalks that's just a small proportion of what we've picked suddenly the next stage is then to mash it up now that can be great fun but if it's full of stalks it just tastes so much more time and you get less out of it so I've stripped them it's the world's most boring job and then I'm gonna give them a good mash so see this is now back to pulp wet and mushy so this is now ready for the next stage so tip it into a sieve and let the juice run through into the bowl underneath I've now finished pressing the pulp through with the sieve so this is the juice now that's pure blackberry and elderberry juice and when I was putting it through the sieve I was actually pressing it through to make sure as much as of the juice as possible has gone through and now we've put the pulp into a preserving pan so here's the preserving pan with the pulping and we've added a bit of water just enough to cover it and what we're going to do is try and simmer out the rest of the juice and then this once it's ready we'll go through with save again the aim is to get get the maximum amount of juice out of the pulp the juice from the fruit has now been transferred into a bucket so that's it in [ __ ] it so I'm going to put that to one side overnight and then we're going to strain in a couple of minutes the fruit pulp that's been in the pan and we're going to keep for the time being the two different juices separate because the first juice has natural yeast in it and we want that to ferment the the juice and turn it into champagne what we've done with the juice in the pan because we've bonded up is that has now killed off any of the yeast in it and therefore if we bomb that not in that with the first bit of juice it'll still be hot at this point and therefore it'll kill off the yeast in the juice that we've got on the first round and we don't want that to happen because we want that ease there to do the fermenting so it will be allowed to strain overnight the juice from the pan and it will cool down overnight as well and then tomorrow morning we'll mix the two together so here we have the borrowed pulp and he's just draining through these two saves I put into two separate bowls and two suits just to make it a bit quicker and this should be ready in the morning for the next day so overnight the juice has been straining about two bowls of that to go in to the fermenting bucket with the extract that we got last night and what we're gonna also add is one cup of sugar now the berries have sugars in anyway so we don't want to add too much sugar but at the end of the day comes down very much to taste so if you want a really sweet one then obviously more sugar but just bear in mind that there are lots of natural sugar in the juice from the fruit and also going to add in just a quarter cup of vinegar and the point about that is that slows down the fermentation process if you don't put it in then it'll what happened is what happened to me a couple a few years ago when I made elderflower champagne no vinegar into slow down and water right the fermentation process so when the we opened the bottles it blew out most of the contents and the corpse went into low Earth orbit in the fermenting bucket we've now got all the ingredients so remember don't need to add yeast to this because they'll be naturally occurring yeast from the berries a little bit of sugar pretty much to taste give it a good stir to make sure that the sugar is dissolved and a little bit of vinegar to slow up the process and then you leave this standing for about 4 days in a cool room with the tea towel over the top of it and for four days should he be enough to get the fermentation process underway and that's really convenient for me because I'm about to go away for four days so I'll have this to deal with when I go back the champagne has been fermenting for a few days now you can see the mold on the surface so what we're going to do now is scrape off that mold so to do that we simply use a serving spoon so we've taken off as much as we can at this stage right so most of the motor has been taken off the surface and what we're going to do is just test it because what I'm showing today it hasn't turned to vinegar and and it doesn't seem to do but what we also need to do is add some more sugar to this because this is quite dry and because it's a champagne it's meant to be movie isn't be sweet so probably add another cup full of sugar thank you that a good stir and again in a moment we'll test to see whether you think it's sweet enough ultimately the sweetness comes down to taste but there needs to be enough sugars in the champagne for the fermentation to continue in the bottles so once you're satisfied with the sweetness you need champagne bottles to put this into now the reason for champagne bottles is well as it is obviously red champagne but these are very heavy tough bottles put them into wine bottles and they'll explode after a few days these however are designed to take the pressure of the fermented champagne inside them so we have three bottles of red champagne and as you can see we put a cork in plastic cork in this case on the top and it is wired down because the fermentation continues in the bottle so if you don't have the cork why it down it's likely to be blown out and you lose the entire contents you'll also get a bit of a set as sediment in there as well but if when you store them you store them lying on their side like that there are commercial ways for the sediments to be fro to be frozen and sliced off and then the pork or cove goes back in we're just amateurs so we'll put up with the sediments at the bottom no three bottles and we completely miscalculated the amount that we had because we thought we only needed it three bottles and in fact we have nearly a liter of the but roughly and elderberry juice left over so we're not going to make another bottle of champagne with that instead and we're going to turn that into a fruit liqueur so into a kiln a jar put 200 grams of sugar and then 400 mils of champagne mix and then it was using bit about this similar quantity the actual quantities of vodka and liquids and champagne can vary we could put up to six hundred mils of vodka into there it's doesn't have strong you wanted to I guess now normally want to make elder oh sorry but make fruit liqueurs I have these standing in a bottle for about three months and it takes about up to a month for all the sugar to dissolve this would then get a shake every day in its first month and then shake every week and to all the three months are over but because this is all liquid liquid juice from the fruit then you don't actually need to wait three months to drink it or should be ready within about a month and the vodka in there will actually kill the the yeast so there'll be no fermenting in here so you don't need to worry about it exploding but in about a month's time this will be ready for drinking it's been a couple of weeks since we bottled up the red champagne and we had three bottles there's two of them now here's the third as you can see it has blown its cork which means it was threatening more heavily in the bottle than I was expecting however since this is now blown some of its contents all over our kitchen the rest of the contents of this bottle can at least be tested now it's lost its fizz and because of it having blowed out the top of the bottle but you know that's not bad that's not bad at all