It's nearly summer, and the dandelion flowers are probably mostly gone where you are. But here, I'm still in the middle of making dandelion wine. Oh, the flowers are mostly gone here too, but it's a long process. Not a hard one--just a long one.
For two years now Anhata and I have made dandelion wine in the spring. This post will prepare you for next spring's crop, and it's a great introduction to winemaking if you've always been interested but didn't know where to start.
For this tonic wine, it starts with picking dandelion flowers. We make it into a party for our girls. Everyone grabs a basket and out into our yard we go to pick until our fingers turn yellow. We get a spectacular crop of dandelions every year because we don't care about lawns. We have what Hata calls a "feral meadow." 
Look for UNSPRAYED AREAS to pick your dandelions. You don't want to be consuming Roundup or some dang thing. And stay away from high traffic areas so that you're not dealing with exhaust fumes either.
For each batch of wine using our favorite recipe (#2), you need two quarts of flowers. We keep the sepals--the green part at the bottom of the flower--on. We like the slightly bitter taste it gives the finished product, and I feel it adds to the medicinal qualities of the finished wine. Yeah, we really do make this stuff as a tonic, though it tastes pretty good, rather reminiscent of sake. (I have to be careful because it also has quite a kick to it and I am in recovery. So far, no problems.)
Pour a gallon of boiling water over the flowers, cover with a cloth and let steep for no more than two days. I put the pot back in the pantry with the kombucha and other fermenting things.
When they're done steeping, take a sieve and line it with cheesecloth or muslin. I use a clean "flour sack" type tea towel. Strain the flower water through the sieve into a new pot. I then pick up the towel and give the flowers a good press, gathering up the edges and twisting the bundle of flowers to get all the water out of them. Bring the resulting "tea" to a boil. It'll smell pretty bitter, and it is.
Add the peel of four ORGANIC oranges--just the peel, not the white pith. I use a vegetable peeler to get just the orange part off. Boil for ten minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in 2 lbs 11 ozs of granulated sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Let cool thoroughly, and then add a packet of champagne yeast and the juice of the four oranges. The recipe calls for adding yeast nutrient. Last year we didn't and it came out fine; this year we did, and I'll let you know how it comes out.
Strain again into a fermenting vessel of some kind. You can use a special plastic fermenter, or go cheap like me. I use a glass gallon jug from some apple juice, fitted with an airlock I bought for under $2 at a wine supply store.
Then comes the easy part. Let it sit some place out of the way until it clears. It will bubble like mad the first few weeks and then it will start to settle. I leave it for about five months or so and then Anhata comes over and we siphon it off into liter-sized EZ Cap bottles. Be careful to leave the sediment in the fermenting vessel, which is why you want to siphon instead of pour the young wine into bottles. Hata takes half the wine, I take the other half, and we put it in the back of our cupboards and forget about it until Winter Solstice. The recipe site says it's even better if you let it sit until the spring, but we make this stuff especially for winter liver and blood support, so Yuletide it is.
For a tonic, take about an ounce every couple of days however you please throughout the winter. You can drink it several ways. Hata likes to heat it up like a toddy. I like it with fizzy water, lemon and a sugar cube, but more often than not I just drink it neat right before bed.
Winemaking is just one more way to increase your self-reliance, especially if the wine also serves a dual function as a medicinal tonic. It's also a lot of fun!
 | The Home Winemaker's Companion: Secrets, Recipes, and Know-How for Making 115 Great-Tasting Wines asin: 1580172091 |
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