Country Wine, Chateaux Sallygardens

Wine making is something I've wanted to try for years and now that we grow the majority of our own food at home one of the biggest expenses on our tiny food bill is alcohol. The timing for having a go at this craft is perfect. It will reduce our expenses, utilise locally grown wild plants and cut down on all those air miles and energy that go into producing commercial wine. Of course, I'll still enjoy the odd bottle of Cabernet-Shiraz, St Emilion or Chateauxneuf Du Pape! The question is will our home brewed wine taste nice enough to replace our weekly bottle of bought red wine or will friends throw their eyes to heaven as we produce our dreaded liquid offering at dinner parties.  Time will tell.

I ordered a few glass demijohns, yeast and yeast nutrient  from The Homebrew Centre in Co Clare, who deliver nationwide and provide good advice if you seek it. Our wine won't be made from grapes, well at least not until the grape vines in the polytunnel are a few years old. I'm a believer in utilising what we find in our home environment and in this case we've decided to harvest a variety of seasonal flowers and berries from the surrounding fields to make our wines. There's a whole range of possible plant parts you can use to give flavour and colour to wine; dandelion, gorse, rose and elder flowers, blackberry and elderberry, even nettles, rose hips or birch tree sap can all be tried. During the summer there's usually at least one thing mother nature has on offer that you can pop into a brew. You can even try leaving out packet yeast, in the hope that wild yeasts will be there to do the business instead.

Our first attempt is a joint family effort. Dan and the children all picked a bucket full of dandelion blossom one sunny afternoon. A demijohn holds a gallon of liquid (4.5 litres) and you need to collect the same volume in blossom (berry or leaf). Place the blossom in a large pot and pour in a gallon of boiled water. Push the contents down into the water with a wooden spoon so nothing is floating dry on top. Leave the mixture to cool down to the temperature recommended on your particular packet of yeast (different strains of yeast flourish at different temperatures). Scoop out the flowers, squeezing them to release all the fluid. Enjoy the sweet aroma as you do this.

Stir in a 1.8 kilos of organic sugar, the juice of 4 lemons and a spoon of yeast nutrient. Stir well and then sprinkle the yeast on top of the liquid. After fifteen minutes stir the yeast down into the mixture. Pour the mixture through a sieve on a funnel and into the sterilised demijohn. Seal it with an air filter. As the yeast consumes the sugar and coverts it to alcohol, gas bubbles of carbon dioxide will exit through the water in the air filter. Once the yeast has stopped (a few months, depending on weather temperature) siphon off the mixture into wine bottles, leaving any sediment behind in the demijohn. Label the bottles, wait a few months or a year if you can bear it ... then drink at leisure.

I shall let you know how we rate our wine in a few months time.

Comments

[Alan]

Wow, gorse wine. Who'd a thought. I met this plant a few years ago in New Zealand (haven't seen it in the States)and was amazed at it's formidable nature. It always seemed to be in the landscape of books I'd read, but they never really described it. The flowers are quite lovely, but you must have been wearing armor to pick them. Good luck with the wine. The effort should make it wonderful.

[Maddy]

Rebecca that is going to be so much fun, I'd love to grow grapes but the birds here would have a field day with them. Good luck on this one, it sounds very posh actally.

[Lizz]

Dandelion wine, sweet as the sunshine!

[Christine]

I have been reading your blog for several months now and really have enjoyed it.

My husband and I have been making Mead (Honey Wine) for a long time and we find we get better results if we rack the liquid several times before bottling. (Racking wine is the process of separating wine from its sediment, or lees, and transferring the wine into another container using a siphon. http://www.ehow.com/how_1624_rack-wine.html )

We have frequently found that if the wine is left on the lees until bottling that we end up with quite a yeasty flavour (this is good for beer, but not always nice in wine).

I hope you enjoy your first attempt at wine making as well as the end results!

[N. & J.]

Good luck! We aren't big alcohol drinkers but J. really wants to try beer making because he likes the idea of having more control over the outcome and trying different variations. One we move I think he is going set up a mini brewery :)

[colour it green]

have fun! tip: wrap newspaper around the demijohn to keep out the light if you want to keep that nice golden colour. And it can take a while to work out.. (my elderflower wine started May last year is still bubbling.....)

[katrien]

My husband made wine last year and though I was extremely skeptical of the result because he handled it in such a haphazard way - forgetting to strain it, moving it around our apartment, hiding it in closets, etc. - it was *lovely*! What an achievement. Good luck to you and cheers!

[Rhonda Jean]

I wish you the best for your wine. I'd like to try to make beer at some point. Don't you just love the old names - demijohn, it sounds so much more substantial than litre or pint.

[cliodhna]

hey, cool, good luck,
I made raspberry wine once. I used most of it to cook with until some too-drunk flatmates out of alchohol spied the remaning four bottles and against all my warnings they drank them. man, were they in bad shape the next morning!
there is a company in galway making natural wines, really wonderful

[Flibbertygibbet]

Hurrah for being Typepad's featured blog, lovely lady! And thanks for the link to the Homebrew Centre - my parents have lots of apple trees so I wonder if the Homebrew centre has links for cider making...

[jean]

Hear, hear! Typepad featured blog. Brilliant!

[Eloise]

I have some homemade bottled wine and tasted it after a year a while ago and it tasted of sugery vinegar so it will have to be left longer, but have been told by a homemade wine person beware of explosive wine they advised to wire the tops of bottles and keep them in shed. While you are growing lots of veges you could be growing hops which i have tasted some very nice homemade beer made with homegrown hops.
If you do decide to make beer the best chemical free and tasty beer kit is Coopers stout an ozzie brew. I have previously been making beer for twenty years and found it only went wrong when I made it in a keg. bottling it works best. I have given up alcohol for health reasons, but would like to make cordials like blackberry as they are free. If you get round to making cordials let me know. best of luck with your wine. Ps. Ginger beer is great to and you can keep making it over and over.

[Rebecca Hillman]

Thanks for all the tips. Unfortunately I killed the dandelion wine by leaving it in the window, it got too hot and killed the yeast. I wrongly thought the warmer the better! I am going to try and restart it with a champagne yeast, and will blog about it later. I have 2 more elderflower wines doing very well now.

[Jeff]

Most enjoyable read. Making win eis great fun. Sometimes a little frustrating to.

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