Any one have any recipies for dandylion wine ( or other fruit wine)?

My lawn is covered in purty yellow flowers. It is a winery in the making.

I want to make a nice dandylion wine.

Anyone have any successful recipies or attempts at wine that they’d like to share?
Thanks.

No, not for dandelions, although God knows, I’ve got plenty of the raw materials in my lawn.

I have chokecherry trees and wild plums and I’ve made wine from them, though. I think the basic drill for dandelions would be similar. Gather up the raw materials - buckets full of chokecherries, wild plums, or, I guess, dandelion blossoms, and cover them with hot water. You could heat the raw materials in the water to extract more flavor, but then you have to cool the batch to a temperature that’s conducive to yeast survival -80-90 F, or so. Add a couple of cups of sugar, and pitch your yeast - a good wine yeast from the brewing store, not bread yeast ferGawd’sSake, and wait. A week or two.

This is called “fermenting on the pulp”.

Siphon your must off the pulp, and add some more sugar. From here on out, the yeast will consume the sugar, until it drowns itself in its own waste products - alcohol, wonderful alcohol. Draw off a little sample from time to time and taste it. Too sour? - add more sugar; Too sweet? - stop adding sugar - until it ferments itself out, and it’s about the sweetness level you want.

You can rack the wine off the yeast sediment every once in a while if the process is taking a long time.

Finally, after a coupla months, fermentation is complete and the wine is at the sweetness level you want, and you can bottle it - if there’s any left after all that sampling. :smiley:

That’s how I do it, anyway. But I’m more of a serious beer brewer - I only dabble in wine because of all those pesky trees in my backyard. I’ve made some dang good wine this way, though, especially chokecherry. Nice full flavor with astringincy balanced by the sweetness. Kinda like MD 20/20.

I’ve made batches of dandelion wine the past couple of years, it’s pretty good stuff in my opinion. And of course, since I don’t weed or spray my lawn I’ve got plenty of raw material. I used a recipe from this site the first time. It worked quite well. The second time I fiddled with the recipe a bit as I like a sweeter wine. There are a bunch of other recipes for fruit wines on the site as well.
I’ve given out bottles of dandelion wine as gifts the past two Christmases to family and friends. They claim to have enjoyed it. Here’sa shot of my last batch, merrily fermenting away.

Have fun! (And don’t drink it all at once. :slight_smile: )

Someone should tell him that adding a little “Je ne sais pas” means adding a little “I don’t know.” The phrase he is looking for is “Je Ne Sais Quoi,” which means “A quality that is hard to express.”

3 years of high school French and two of college and I finally used it.

dwyr Thanks for the pic and link. I would have ( wrongly) thought that the flowers would have sunk to the bottom. Heh.

How big is that bottle? I’ve been thinking of buying one of those 5 gallon pickle jars at Costco for my project.

maybe about 5 years ago we had a bodacious bumper crop on our Japanese plum tree. i mean, there were so many plums the upper branches were cracking under the weight! it looked more like grape clusters in spots.

we decided to pick the fruit to prevent wholesale damage to the tree. my husband decided, since we had at least two 5 gallon buckets of plums, that we should do something with them… something, in this case, being trying to make wine.

making wine must be on the order of a Force of Nature, 'cause our combined knowlege still provides about next to nothing regarding how to do it right.

we sorted through the fruit to discard debris and any really bad-looking (obviously moldy) fruit. my husband went for the “I Love Lucy” school of mashing the fruit. at this point, i decided it was his project, so bowed out with the exception of occasional technical advice. as best i recall, we probably added some water to the mash. i told him to add sugar to feed the fermentation process. i even bought him a short wooden canoe paddle to help stir in the sugar. i think we left the containers in the garage, since it was probably too cool in the basement for things to happen. probably had a non-sealing cover on the buckets too, to keep out uninvited additives.

(somewhat to my surprise), bubbles did indeed start to form in the mix. we never added yeast, since we figured there was probably enough that had been naturally present on the fruit to get things rolling. and roll they did! it got a little scary at times, peeking into the buckets. it was like watching some dark red concoction doing a very slow simmer on the stove after a while. (“It’s alive!” jokes abounded around this period.)

my husband fed the brew more sugar a couple times. when he finally decided it had reached a point to his liking, we bought a bunch of wine-type bottles, strained the mixture and put it into some humongous glass containers with spigots. (think those Sun Tea-type jars on about an 8-gallon scale). from there we bottled it. that Christmas many people received a bottle of home-made plum wine.

nobody died. in fact, hubby said someone asked him just this year if he’s ever going to make any more plum wine. :dubious:

(the tree has never since had such an exuberance of fruit.)

FWIW, he also experimented in trying to make some sort of home-made brandy. this mainly consisted of buying some brandy and adding it to selected bottles, to try and raise the alcohol content. he said it was pretty good. me, i’m not into that stuff.

ya know, now that i think of it, i’m pretty sure one of those giant containers is still in the basement. with some still-undecanted remainder of the original batch.

maybe i better go check on the cats… Patter spends an awful lot of time in the basement.

lachesis

<slight hijack>

This seems as good a place to ask as any – Besides dandelion, are there any wines that are NOT made from fruit? The other day Mr. S and I saw a billboard for an “All Fruit Wine” winery, or something like that. We looked at each other and both commented that we thought all wines were made from fruit (except dandelion wine). What else is there? Potato wine? Pork wine? Wheat wine?

:confused:

</slight hijack>

Mead is wine made from honey.

Shirley
It’s about a five gallon glass carboy. I bought it online as I didn’t have any container large enough around the house. You need something to which you can attach an airlock to let the gas produced by fermentation out without letting air in.
While dandelions do float, in that picture I linked to the stuff at the top is actually a mass of raisins for extra body in the wine. I steeped the flowers in boiling water, cooled them, then added sugar, some lemons and oranges, yeast and slopped it all into a big bucket for primary fermentation. Then after a few days I strained the mixture into the carboy, tossed in the raisins, slapped on the airlock and let it ferment until it was done.
Scarlett67
I’ve seen a lot of pretty odd-looking wine recipes from a variety of ingredients such as barley, parsnips, beets, artichokes, cabbage and chickweed. I’m considering trying a batch of onion wine myself. :slight_smile:

There’s also rice wine like sake and a grain or potato wine called soju.

Here’s some info on Korean wines.

My grandmother makes a very sweet, pink, Vietnamese rice wine and has refused to tell me how to make it, unless I learn to speak her language. :frowning:

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/recipes.asp

Almonds, parsnips, elderberries, roses, barley (aka really strong beer), beets, broom…

That’s as far as the website went before the host said he lost the rest of the website due to a server crash (although he has a great many more recipes available for people who request them via email.

Previous thread on the subject.