Dandelion Wine - Part One

 I freely admit, I love dandelions!  It seems like I'm in the minority on that, too.  In my days of working at the garden center there were SO MANY people coming in to buy nasty poison to kill these plants.  I would just cringe as I rang up their purchases.  See, not only do dandelions make great food for our honeybees, they also make a wonderful wine.  The first time I made this wine it was definitely a learning experience as to what NOT to do.  I mean, I got wine but you could clean out a car engine with it because of how strong it got!  It never fully cleared and was always pretty hazy.  In the end though, I got wine and considered my first attempt at winemaking a success.  In any type of homebrewing, sanitation is key.  If you're not someone who takes extreme cleanliness seriously, homebrewing is not for you.  All of the equipment you need should be cleaned and disinfected before you use it, everytime you use it.  There are many good beer and wine homebrew companies out there that sell almost all the supplies you need to get started.  I decided to give it another go this year.  I found what I think will be a good recipe to use.  I decided to use a recipe from Jack Keller's website.  You can find it here.  I used recipe 29.  He has a wonderful glossary of different winemaking terms to help you understand everything as you go.  Okay!  So to start off, we needed dandelions.  Lots and lots of dandelions!!  For this particular wine recipe I needed nine cups of dandelion petals.  Nine!  You only use the petals because the rest of the plant is very bitter.

 My children took the task of collecting all these dandelions very seriously!  It was quite cute.  Willow got especially involved.  She seemed very happy to have a "job" to do.

 

Here are both of the kids with their collection of dandelions.  Ronan was too interested in trying to fling out handfuls of picked blossoms.  Willow was trying to get him to realize that we needed them inside the bowl and not out!  I really do have some sweet children.

Ok, enough talking about the kids!  Once we had picked all the blossoms we would need, it was time for me to pluck the petals.  This was the part that took awhile.  Like I mentioned earlier, I needed nine cups of petals.  This was just the beginning.... 

 

About two hours later I finally had the amount of petals that I needed.  The petals along with the zest of two oranges and two lemons got placed into a nylon straining bag and tied up.  I used a good vegetable peeler to carefully remove the zest from the oranges and lemons in strips.  However you choose to do it, use care not to get much if any of the bitter white pith underneath the zest. 

I put the bag into the primary fermentation vessel and poured the proper amount of boiling water over the petal/zest bag.  I did have a photo of this step but for some odd reason I can not get it to upload on here!  The bag needs to be squeezed a few times a day for a few days.  This is what this brew looks like once you remove the bag at the end of day three.  I strained out the extra little petals that escaped through the holes in the bag that you see floating on the top.

Now is when you add the sugar and dissolve it well.  This particular recipe also calls for the addition of white grape juice and citrus juice which you add once the sugar is dissolved.  Now is the time that yeast nutrient, tannin, and pectic enzyme are also added.   Here you can see what some of these wine additives look like.  I should say, the Acid Blend is not used in this recipe.

 Each of these ingredients play an important role in the winemaking process.  Please see Jack Keller's Glossary of Winemaking Terms for what each one is responsible for.  Stir all of these ingredients well, cover the primary, and set it aside for twelve hours.  After twelve hours, it's time for the addition of yeast.  Yeast is so important in the making of wine.  Different wines use different yeasts, and boy are there A LOT of different wine yeasts out there!  Your recipe will generally tell you the type you need.  The yeast is what is responsible for turning the sugars into alcohol.  Before you add the yeast to the rest of the ingredients you need to activate it.  This particular yeast required me to mix the yeast into 1/2 cup of warm water and leave it to "proof" for 15 minutes. This isn't the best picture, but you can sort of see the white foam that formed on the top.

 After 15 minutes, this gets added to the mix.  Cover the fermentor and let it go.  You will need to gently stir this mixture twice a day for five days.  This mixture gets very active as fermentation gets going.  It hisses and bubbles away!!  You can also see the foam that forms on the top as ferments. 

After five days it is time for the very young wine to be racked into a sterilized secondary fermentor that will be fitted with an airlock.  I use a one-gallon glass carbouy.  The airlock lets the carbon dioxide produced during fermentation out but keeps oxygen from getting in.  Oxygen is not a friend of wine.  If too much oxygenation occurs, you'll end up with vinegar!  How do you think we get apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar?  Oxygen exposure to the wine.  There are special tools to help you transfer the wine from one carbouy to the next without adding too much extra oxygen.  Here you can see what the very young wine looked like right after it was put into the carbouy.  It's VERY cloudy and would not taste very good at all if you were brave enough to take a taste at this point.  It has a long way to go yet and still had some fermentation to complete. 

I covered the carbouy with a cloth to keep it in the dark.  It bubbled away for another week or so.  During this time a lot of sludge fell to the bottom of the carbouy as the wine started to clear.  This sludge is called "lees."  At this point in the process I just had to wait.  I had to wait for fermentation to totally stop and the wine to fall as clear as possible.  This took about three weeks.  I again had to rack the wine into another clean, sterilized one-gallon glass carbouy.  At this time I added a crushed Campden tablet and attached the airlock once again.   You can see in the following picture how much more clear it had become.  There was a lot of glare in this photo and it actually looked more clear in person. 

The wine will continue to clear the longer it sits and ages.  I have to repeat the racking and addition of a crushed Campden tablet in two months.  For right now it is sitting quietly and peacefully in the dark coolness of our basement.  I will be sure to post updates as they happen.  Watch for Part Two in a couple of months!