Joy of Home Wine Making (35 page)

6-8 cups dandelions, packed lightly

1 gallon water

3 lbs. sugar or 3½ lbs. honey

1 tsp. yeast nutrient

¼ tsp. tannin

3 tsps. acid blend or juice of 2 fresh lemons

1 Campden tablet, crushed (optional)

1 packet champagne or Montrachet yeast

Pick the dandelions in an area that is not polluted with car or dog exhaust. This might not be easy, because dandelions love disturbed ground like roadsides. Be very sure the dandelions haven’t been sprayed with herbicide.

Gather these and all flowers when they are in full bloom and the dew of the morning has dried. That’s when the fragrance is best.

They are kind of tedious to pick, as they are low to the ground, but put on some knee pads and go to it. The wine is worth it.

Most people don’t realize how fragrant dandelions are. They are my favorite flower.

After you pick them, remove all the green parts, especially the stem, which is bitter. Process them as soon as you can, without washing, to preserve the delicate fragrance. The wine will not be yellow. A lot of people think it should be, but it isn’t. In fact, the color is really not very wonderful at all. The taste is.

Keep dandelion wine a year before you drink it. I like it dry dry dry. Stabilize and sweeten if you think you’ll feel different about it. Read Mr. Bradbury’s books, but be careful about sharing an elevator with him.

GRAIN WINES

These go back a long way. Back in the olden days, if there were a peasant with some extra grain and honey that didn’t go into beer or holiday bread, she would put it into wine as a good way of making festive use of the surplus before the Cossacks got it.

Beer and wine not only helped keep disease down by being safe to drink but they were also good medicine and a high-caloric food for people who were ill. In times of famine, beer and wine would satisfy more stomachs than gruel would, although the hang
overs must have been terrible. Hmm, maybe that was the point. After a couple of days of imbibing, no one would WANT to eat.

Many of these wines are flavored with flowers, spices, and fruits.

Another use for grains, which we will get into later, is to use them to give body to other wines, as well as give them more color. In this section I will stick to very simple wines. In making some of the following recipes, you’ll gain an appreciation of what grain can do for your wines, and what the flavors and colors are like.

QUALITY TIME!

You see a lot of ads and signs these days saying things like Quality Mattress Sale! or Quality Used Cars. My question is always, what kind of quality? Good, bad, indifferent? Quality doesn’t just mean
good
quality. It is a noun that can be qualified many different ways.

The question applies to whole grains as well. Allow me to warn you that whole grains go rancid. That is why milling and white bread were invented. Take off that bothersome bran and pesky germ, and the grain keeps better because nothing can go bad. Much of the nutrition goes down the drain or to the pigs, but so what?

It’s important to buy only good whole or freshly cracked grains to make these wines. Buy the
best
quality you can get. Don’t pick up a box from an obscure corner of the grocery; it’ll be stale for sure. Go to a co-op or whole foods store and buy grains by the pound. It will be fresher and cheaper.

Take a good sniff of the grain in the bin if you can. If it’s fresh, it will smell great. If it’s stale or even rancid, you’ll know by the smell of rancid oil, or a metallic smell. If it doesn’t smell good, don’t buy it.

If you live in an area that doesn’t have a food co-op, you can buy some pretty good brands in the health food section of the grocery, and you can also order whole grains by mail. Arrowhead Mills makes some nice products, and they date their packages, too. Alternatively, you can go to the local feed store and buy grain there, if they will sell it in small quantities.

Wine supply places don’t generally carry grain unless they sell beermaking supplies as well. If they do carry grain, it is generally expensive and might not always work for wine, especially if you pick up something like “chocolate” malted barley! However, the lighter toastings of barley, assuming they are very fresh, will work very well and will color your wine nicely at the same time.

NOTE: In almost any of these recipes you can use lemon juice and zest instead of the acid blend. You can also add the juice and zest of two or three oranges. This livens up the flavor quite a bit. It’s also very traditional. Just add the orange juice and zests into the straining bag before you pour the hot sugar water over everything, and be sure to use pectic enzyme.

Just be sure to buy
good
quality whole grains for your wine and you won’t go wrong.

There are even some cereals you can use, like Wheat Chex and Shredded Wheat, to help make wine. I’ll show you how to use these cereals and toast to help things along.

I advocate using whole grains, cracked or rolled whole grains, and the like because of the flavor and body these foods have, though we don’t want the starch they release. Using whole wheat flour WILL NOT WORK! Sometimes you can get away with a coarse meal, but not flour. Save it for bread.

So, get thee to the whole foods store, get some supplies, and let’s get back to basics!

CRACKED WHEAT WINE

This one takes some advance preparation, but it’s offset by the cheapness of the wine! Use this as a social wine.

2 lbs. cracked wheat (about four cups)

1 gallon water

1 lb. golden raisins (optional, but nice)

3 lbs. sugar or 3½ lbs. light honey

4 tsps. acid blend or juice and zest of 3 large lemons

juice and zest of 2-3 oranges (optional)

½ tsp. tannin

1 tsp. yeast nutrient

1 Campden tablet, crushed (optional)

1 tsp. pectic enzyme (if you use the oranges)

1 packet champagne or sherry yeast

The day before: Preheat your oven to 375-400°F. Spread the wheat out in a clean cookie pan or pans, and bake it for about 10 minutes, stirring it and turning it over with a spatula every couple of minutes. You want it to smell toasty and to be a light brown (but darker than it was originally). Be careful, because it is easy to burn.

Take the wheat out of the oven, stir it all again, and let it cool down.

After it is cool, put it in a clean glass or steel bowl with the chopped or ground raisins and enough of the water to cover.

The next day: Put it all, including the citrus zest if you are using it, in a
fine
nylon straining bag, and place it into a sanitized primary fermenter. Pour in the soaking water. Heat the rest of the water and the sugar or honey to boiling, skim if necessary, and pour over the nylon straining bag. Add the orange juice if you are using it. Add the acid blend, yeast nutrient, and tannin. Cover.

After it cools down, add the Campden tablet, if you choose to use one. Cover and fit with an air lock. Twelve hours after the Campden tablet, add the pectic enzyme. If you don’t use the tablet, merely wait until the must cools down to add the pectic enzyme.

Twenty-four hours later, take the PA and add the yeast. If you want to, you can give the yeast a nudge by starting it in boiled, cooled orange juice.

Stir daily. After a couple of weeks, when the PA is down to 3 to 4 percent, take out the bag and let it drain. Do not squeeze. Discard the grain. Let the wine settle, then rack it into a secondary fermenter. Bung and fit with an air lock.

Rack once or twice in the next six months or so, depending on how much deposit it throws. It might take more time to clear. When it does, rack it out and bottle it. If you want a sweeter wine, stabilize and sweeten it, then bottle. This keeps well, and is very useful for blending.

NOTE: You can make this a very strong wine by adding another half pound of sugar to it. Wait until the PA reading is down to 6 percent or so, and boil the sugar with a pint of water and cool. Add the syrup to the wine, then continue the fermentation.

BARE BARLEY WINE