Joy of Home Wine Making (40 page)

FURTHER SUGGESTIONS FOR FLOWERS AND HERBS

After you’ve made plain herb and flower wines a few times, use them to enhance a single-fruit wine. Use apple, pear, carrot, citrus, potato, beet, or barley as a base for herb and flower wines. Just make the wines the way you normally would, using part of the water to decoct the flavor from the herb and part of it to dissolve the sugar or honey.

You can use herb teas to flavor wines, too. I’ve added Red Zinger to a mixed-fruit wine to help round off the flavor several times, and to meads that seemed a bit pale. You can use an ounce of so of Red Zinger tea in part of the water in a basic apple juice wine for a pleasant hibiscus flavor and pink color. Or you can use rose hip tea in a similar manner. If you have some rosebushes, you could get really creative and try this wine named after one of my nieces, whose name is Rosy:

ROSY APPLE MELOMEL

This is a bit of a risk. I’ve only done it once, though I plan to do it again.

The success of this wine depends on how potent your rose petals are. You are after color and flavor. Remember to pick the roses on a warm day after the dew has dried. Don Juan is a good tea rose for this recipe. The old-fashioned roses are best. If your red roses aren’t very fragrant, you can use what you have for color, adding fragrant but paler roses for taste.

12. oz. can frozen apple juice or pressed juice of 8 lbs. fresh apples

petals from as many unsprayed red or dark pink roses as you can obtain, ideally 2 cups or more, the more fragrant the better

2 lbs. sugar or 2½ lbs. very light honey

1 gallon water

3 tsps. acid blend

¼ tsp. tannin

1 tsp. yeast nutrient

1 Campden tablet, crushed (optional)

½ tsp. pectic enzyme

1 packet champagne yeast

Put the rinsed petals into two cups of the water, heat to a simmer, turn off the heat, cover, and let sit for an hour or so. Heat the rest of the water with the sugar to dissolve. Strain and press the liquid off the petals into the primary fermenter. Add the rest of the water and sugar after it has cooled. You don’t want it to be hot, because if it is it will drive off some of the fragrance of the roses. Proceed the way you normally would for apple wine (Rich Apple Wine), checking the PA, etc.

NOTE: There are so many possibilities here. Apple with chamomile, apple with dandelion, apple with elderflowers, lavender, etc. Pear and barley wines would also be good enhanced with flower fragrances.

I wonder how raspberry and roses would come out? Cherry and roses?

At bottling time, remember this is better slightly sweet, not dry. If the fragrance is good but the color is pale, you can cheat and add a tiny bit of red food coloring to the wine. If the fragrance is too faint, you can hope it recovers. Or, I suppose, you could add some food-grade rose water. DON’T use perfume or anything else that hasn’t been cleared for food consumption.

SINGLE ENHANCED WINES

STRAWBERRY LEMONADE WINE

Strawberry lemonade is an old-fashioned drink from which insipid canned pink lemonade seems to have evolved. I found an old recipe in a canning book from before World War II and decided to try it as wine. I had some strawberries that were kind of blah and needed help. So I enhanced them.

Use the Strawberry Wine recipe in Lips like Strawberry Wine for your base, and use a 6 ounce can of lemonade INSTEAD of the acid blend. Add the zest of two or three whole, fresh lemons to the strawberries in the straining bag. Don’t use the lemon juice. Adding it here will create too much acidity. Proceed as normal. The resulting wine will have a bit higher alcohol content because of the sugar in the lemonade. Use it as a social wine or as the basis for a cooler in the summer.

Other ideas that are on my list to try are watermelon base enhanced with lime, apple with orange, blueberry with orange, blackberry with lemon, cantaloupe and spice, papaya or mango and lime.

ECONOMY ROSÉ WINES

Another idea when things are a little tight in the finance department but you still want to build your cellar is making wines with the inexpensive fruit juices like apple and white grape, or orange, adding a small amount of the more expensive or hard-to-get fresh fruits.

In a way, this is borrowing an idea from the bottled and frozen fruit juice companies. If you look closely at the ingredients they use, you see that they have a base of white grape juice or apple juice, with other juices added in to perk them up.

Cruise the aisles and check out the combinations. The better combos are at the whole food or co-op stores.

Use the Rosy Apple Melomel recipe as a base, with sugar or honey and fruit instead of the rose petals. Use a 12-24 ounce can of frozen white grape or apple juice and add a pound or so of pie cherries, raspberries, or blueberries to the basic recipe, checking the PA carefully so you don’t overdo it on the sugar.

Orange juice works well, too, but you will often get a more apricot color than rosé, though it depends on the fruit you use. Orange juice with absolutely dead ripe apricots or peaches added is VERY nice. In northern climes, trying to get really ripe apricots and peaches is difficult and expensive, so when you do happen upon a few, be ready!

DARING DUOS

We’d better consider flavors before we go much further.

By now you realize that some fruit and vegetable flavors are more assertive than others. The following isn’t meant to be a complete list, and your opinions may differ from mine.

Duos are wines that have two flavors that are of about equal strength, give or take a little, like:

apricot-pineapple

carrot-apricot

apricot-peach

strawberry-rhubarb

watermelon-blueberry

blackberry-raspberry

beet-blueberry

cherry-strawberry

cherry-raspberry

orange-pineapple

raisin-banana

parsnip-raisin

blueberry-raspberry

Sometimes one fruit might be a little more assertive than the other, but you make up for this by using more of the blander fruit.

The only trick to making these wines is to watch the acidity. Either measure it with a kit or use half the acid recommended for one fruit (of the medium acid fruits) and half from the other. I like to make these a bit richer in fruit than the single-fruit wines. It seems to work better that way.

Duos are also a good use for a batch of fruit that isn’t quite good enough to make into a top-notch single-fruit wine. So, one berry is not as flavorful as you would like? Add another kind of fruit that
is
up to par. However, you should NEVER use inferior, spoiled, or unripe fruit. It’s never worth it.

These are usually good table wines that are easier to match with various menus than single-fruit wines are.

Here are a few of my favorites.

LATE JUNE SWOON