Dandelion Wine

The weather here was lovely today, so we went and picked dandelion flowers to make wine with, I say we, but Simon did all the picking and the de-stalking. A wonderful fragrance came from the bag, which I hope will transfer to the finished wine. We've not done much wine making for a couple of years, but as I'm meant to do a talk sometime in the autumn/winter on making herb wines, I thought we'd get some herb wines made up, so we can offer samples. This means having to make lemon balm wine, rose petal wine, lavender wine, blackberry, elderflower and berry wines and a few more besides. As we make each wine I'll post the recipes here.

After tasting rhubarb champagne that one of the ladies brought along to one of Sarah's workshops back in January, I'm hooked, and this year our crop of rhubarb is marked for making some of the delightful stuff. Really easy from the recipe I found, like making elderflower champagne, which is another lovely summery drink.

We're also going to make some herb beers like ginger beer, plus I want to try making some meadowsweet beer and some herb liqueurs. Homemade Dandelion & Burdock is on the cards as well, both as cordial and beer. And Mrs Grieve in her Modern Herbal has a couple I fancy trying including this one:-

Herb Beer that needs no yeast - Use equal quantities of Meadowsweet, Betony, Agrimony and Raspberry leaves (2 oz. of each) boiled in 2 gallons of water for 15 minutes, strained, then 2 lb. of white sugar added and bottled when nearly cool. Intriguing, no yeast! I shall give it a try and see what happens. Whilst we were out earlier, we found some lush patches of young nettles, so we're off to pick some if the weather is fine at weekend, although we can't decide whether to make some nettle beer, nettle wine or Christopher Hedley's wonderful 'Iron Tonic' with them? Maybe we'll have to make all three!

The dandelion wine recipe I use is below, its a tried and trusted recipe that a neighbour gave me about 12 years, the resulting wine is medium sweet and delicious.

Ingredients:

1½ litres Fresh Dandelion Petals
5 litres of water
250g Sultanas
3 Oranges
2 Lemons
4cm piece root ginger (peeled & grated)
1½Kg Granulated Sugar
2 Tbspn Cold Strong Tea
Yeast Sachet (Sauterness type, make up a starter as per pack instructions)
Campden Tablet

Method:

Pick dandelion flower heads only and remove all the green from the flower leaving you with just the yellow petals, place in a bucket and boil 2½ litres of water and pour over the flowers. Cover the flowers with a clean cloth and leave to steep for 2 days, stirring each day. On day 3 pour the contents of the bowl into a large enamel saucepan (not aluminium), add the thinly pared rind of the orange and lemon, ginger root and sugar and bring to the boil stirring until all the sugar has dissolved.

Put the sultanas and the juice of the oranges and lemon into your bucket, pour on the pan contents and add the other 2½ litres of cold water. Cover the bucket once again with a clean cloth and allow to cool to about 70F, 20C then add the cold tea and the yeast starter. Cover the bucket with a lid and leave in a warm place for 3 days.

Strain the liquid into a demijohn and leave to ferment out.