The Winery and the Wines

Ehrlich Brothers specializes in two unique wines made from the farm's own harvest.

The winery is situated on a high ridge above the Hudson River Valley, in Argyle, New York. Ehrlich Brothers has propagated and expanded its nurseries of cultivars of the American Elderberry Sambucus canadensis, obtained from a Vermont horticulturalist and now thriving on Washington County lands favorable to the native plant.   













Both the flower and the mature fruit of the elderberry plant are used, for highly contrasting styles of wine: from the flowers, Elderflower Bubbly; from the fruit, Elderberry Dessert Wine.

Ehrlich Brothers winery specializes in inventive vinification methods which are needed to get the most from the intense fruit and the exceptionally fragrant flower head.

Elderflower Bubbly is a beautiful and delicate sparkling wine that can only be made during a short time window of a few weeks during the June bloom.  The white flower heads, once picked, are rushed to the winery to be processed within 2 hours, carefully, to avoid bruising.

Although preserved elderflower concentrates are readily available commercially, they absolutely can not compete with the proceeds from fresh flowers. Ehrlich Brothers uses no concentrates of any kind, ever. All flavors come from the thousands of flower heads giving their all to the wine-in-process.


Ehrlich Brothers Elderberry Dessert Wine is made in the style of a port wine, using fully-ripened elderberries and carefully-chosen yeast strains.

The berries of a single elderberry bush do not all ripen at the same time - so each bush must be revisited multiple times to ensure harvest of properly-ripened berries only.

The wine is fortified - at just the right time - with brandy spirits from Finger Lakes Distilling in Burdett, New York.

The Dessert Wine is aged for a minimum of ten years before it is judged ready for sale.

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