Swapping out elderflower for sparkling wine

[Loudd85]

Hi, I'm new to home brewing. We've just bottled our first lot of elderflower champagne and we were wondering if we could just swap the elderflower for something like ginger for our next batch?

The recipe we used said we'd have our finished drink in 2 weeks. Every other recipe that I've looked at for other drinks seems to take a lot longer. The recipe we used was just water, sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice, elderflowers and champagne yeast. Can we switch the elderflower for ginger and, if so, what else could we use?

Many thanks!

 

[D the Catastrophist]

Can you make a ginger wine? Definitely!
Jack Keller has a recipe for that: Jack Keller Recipe Collection PDF
So does Adventures is homebrewing: Adventures in Homebrewing Ginger Wine

Will it be ready to drink in two weeks? Well yes, you could probably drink it at that point, but you probably won't like it(I'm not sure if you mean two weeks after starting the initial fermentation, or two weeks after racking to secondary but the answer is still the same).

Why? Most(if not all) wines(and meads) do better with at least some aging. If it is a higher alcohol wine it allows the 'hot' flavor to fade. Young wines can taste harsh. The chemical reactions don't stop when you bottle the wine so the flavors and aromas will keep maturing and softening, becoming more complex.

The elderflower wine you just bottled: if you set a bottle aside somewhere cool like a basement or cellar and let it age will be very different in a year compared to one you try now. You might want to take notes when you taste it now versus later so you can see the change.

The other benefit of waiting longer is that it allows more of the yeast to settle out, so you can then rack it off the lees before bottling. This will give you a clearer wine, and reduce the sediments at the bottom of the bottle.

You might want to consider bulk aging your wine. This will give you a more consistent wine from bottle to bottle.

If you want something that can be ready to drink quicker, I'd look at hard ciders, those can be ready to drink much quicker, though a month and a half is a reasonable expectation for the short end, even for those, especially if you want them 'sparkling' vs 'still'.