Herbal Wine Recipes
Monday was a crash day. This weather and my body really don’t get along so pain equals lots of sleeping and recuperation.
I did rack the Lemon Balm Mead I made last year and it has turned out lovely. This got me thinking of other things I could make with the herbs that are growing merrily away in the garden.
Right: Last year, all combined. Left: This year, racked.
Tuesday I woke up bright and early for some reason and decided to try my hand at some herbal wine.
Check out my Pinterest board for some of the recipes I used to figure out my proportions.
The tarragon was taking over the garden and as I have no idea how to make beer, and I had cobbled together a Chokecherry wine when we lived up in Cochrane, I thought - why not Tarragon wine?
I also had some rhubarb I had harvested from the garden and froze so I used that in place of the usual lemon or orange that gives the wine it’s fresh acidity.
I’m not great for remembering to take pictures through the process, but I do take proper notes so here’s the muddle of herbal wine making by me.
Tarragon Rhubarb Herbal Wine
Ingredients:
4 gallons water
8 quarts fresh tarragon (pack a wide-mouth, quart canning jar lightly with the herb of your choice to measure)
Rhubarb juice (I placed 4 cups of my frozen rhubarb in a 4 quart measuring jar and topped it with boiling water up to 8 cups, then I added 1 cup of sugar. Strained this was my ‘juice’)
8 tsp bread yeast*, because that was all I had to hand
4 inches ginger, sliced
8 cups sugar^
Method:
As with all wine making, and fermentation of most sorts, along with canning, sterilize everything and use non-reactive cookware, utensils etc.
Bring 1 gallon of water to a boil in a large pot. Put the kettle on.
Rinse herbs, remove stems and stray bugs etc.
Place 4 cups of rhubarb fresh or frozen in a large measuring jar and add boiled water from the kettle to make 8 cups. Stir in 1 cup of sugar to dissolve.
Once the rhubarb juice cools, strain out the chunks of rhubarb and set aside. Sprinkle yeast on top of the cooled, strained rhubarb juice and set aside to proof. The yeast will bubble up and foam so make sure there’s enough room in the container you're using so that it doesn’t overflow and make a mess.
Add the ginger to the pot of boiling water, boil gently uncovered for about 10 minutes. Strain the chunks of ginger out and discard. (That felt rather wasteful to me so I added them to a violet oxymel I’m making instead. Violet is cooling to an inflamed throat and ginger is an allround immune booster so they’ll work in concert as a tincture or shrub.)
Take the pot off the element and add the tarragon to the water, cover and allow to infuse for 10-20 minutes.
Put the 8 cups of sugar into your fermenting bucket. When the tarragon is finished infusing, pour the water, through a strainer, into the fermenting bucket. Stir until sugar is completely dissolved. I couldn’t think what to do with the tarragon so I added that to the compost.
Add room temperature water (the 4 gallons) to the fermenting bucket until it is cool enough to add the now proofed yeast and rhubarb juice. You want the water to be warmish, not hot, or the heat might kill the yeast. Add the yeast/juice mix to the fermenting bucket.
Top with the rest of the 4 gallons of water.
Place in a cool, dark spot to ferment. Check it in an hour or so to make sure it’s bubbling. I made mine in a wine bucket with a lid that I place on top loosely but you can do yours in a proper carboy with the airlock or whatever you have on hand.
Allow to ferment until the bubbling stops and the liquid clears, from 2 weeks to several months depending on variables. It will most likely darken during fermentation, this is not a sign that its gone off.
Rack the wine as many times as you would like to clear it.
Bottle and allow to age for 6 months to a year for best flavour.
If you would like to make it a sparkling wine:
After you rack it for the last time into a clean fermentation jug, dissolve 2 heaping tablespoons of sugar in a small amount of warm water.
Add this to the fermentation jug and swirl round to distribute the dissolved sugar throughout.
Bottle immediately.
* I used bread yeast because that was all I had and that’s also what I had used with that Chokecherry wine and it turned out alright.
Can you actually use bread yeast to make wine?
Here’s what Doctor Vinny says over at the Wine Spectator
“If you tried to inoculate your homemade wine with bread yeast, you’d soon realize that yeast strains have varying tolerances for alcohol, too. Bread yeast will typically stop working at about 10 percent alcohol, lower than most wines. And a tired yeast struggling to ferment can start to create some off-putting flavors and aromas.”
So yes, you can use bread yeast but it will produce a wine with less alcohol content and possibly some wonky flavors.
I have wine yeast coming, but I was impatient and wanted to make wine now. Worst case, once the bread yeast quits I’ll just add some more yeast when it comes to keep things fermenting to the proper degree.
You know me, I’m a make do kind of girl.
Your other option of course is to turn your bread yeast wine into a fortified wine if you want a higher alcohol content. Once it stops fermenting at 10% add brandy or something else to up your alcohol content.
“For home winemakers to make a fortified wine with some residual sugar, they simply must fortify (add brandy or other spirits) the fermenting juice and arrest the fermentation (by killing off the yeast with the high alcohol content) while the desired amount of sugar still remains in the fermenter.”
^Yes, this is less sugar than what the recipe calls for. But when I made my Chokecherry wine it turned out so sweet - a dessert wine for sure - so we cut it with club soda and made Fizzy Lifting Drinks with it.
This time round I didn’t want such a sweet wine, I prefer something a little drier. When I was doing the research it suggested 3 cups of sugar to 1 gallon of water for sweet and 2:1 for dry. Hence the amount of sugar I chose to use being lower.
*****
Chervil Lilac Herbal Wine
I really wanted to make lilac wine but didn’t have the required amount to follow Ashley’s recipe from Practical Self Reliance.
So I made this instead.
Ingredients:
4 inches of lilac flowers in the bottom of a quart jar, then top the rest of the jar up with chervil
1 full quart jar of chervil
15 blueberries, frozen
30 green grapes
1 tsp roasted dandelion root
4 cups sugar
1 cup lemon juice
Method:
Bring 3 quarts of water to a boil on the stove.
Add sugar, blueberries, grapes and roasted dandelion root.
Blueberries are to give it a lovely pink colour after the water reacts with the lemon juice.
Grapes are in place or yeast nutrient.
Dandelion root is in place of tannins because I couldn't find a black tea bag in this house for love nor money. The only issue with only drinking loose leaf tea. I suppose I could have used the puerh but it just didn’t seem to go.
Stir to dissolve the sugar and then allow to cool completely.
While the mixture is cooling, gather just the lilac flowers, no stems or green bits, and the chervil leaves and flowers, removed from the stem.
Give them a good rinse to get off any dust or bugs.
In a 2 cup measuring jar place 2 tsp of bread yeast. Add ½ cup of room temperature water and then ladle in some of the sugar mix to just warm the water to activate the yeast. Allow mixture to proof.
While the yeast is proofing, add the flowers and leaves to a gallon jar. Once the sugar water is completely cool pour over top of the lilacs and chervil. Add 1 cup of lemon juice.
Now add the proofed yeast water to the gallon jug full of the lilacs and chervil and sugar water. Give it a good stir to distribute the yeast throughout the mixture.
Place the lid on loosely and put in a cool, dark spot to ferment.
Check in an hour or soo to see that it is bubbling. You may have to give it another good stir round over the next couple days because all of the flowers and leaves and fruit will rise to the top of the gallon jar.
Allow the mixture to ferment for 7- 10 days and then sciphon into a clean gallon jar leaving the fruit and flowers and leaves in the bottom of the original jar.
Ferment for another 2-3 months, up to 6 months, before racking to clear and bottling.
After bottling wait 2-6 months before drinking for optimal flavour.
You can make it a sparkling wine the same way as the Tarragon Rhubarb Wine
Wednesday Josh and I went to pick up some carboys and a hydraulic wine corker and some other kit from a lady I found on Marketplace. Online a plastic 6 gallon carboy was $50, insane, so finding this second hand was an incredible deal. And all of the carboys are glass. Yes, they can shatter, but I much prefer glass to plastic.
Also my dehydrator came, a lovely stainless steel, not plastic-racked dehydrator. I am so excited to use it for a great many things.
But the plants are only small, nothing to harvest just yet. The rhubarb is still young so I have to be judicious in my harvesting and though the strawberries are forming there are no red ones yet.
The chicks are growing, and I found quite a few bugs in the Tallgrass Prairie, but that will be a post for another day.
Thursday, rain, which the garden loved and my body did not.
Friday I went to my sisters and she took me on a tour of her garden. She also had some lilacs, a little past their peak, but still very fragrant and so we snipped off all of the good blooms that were left.
It probably took me about an hour to clean through them all, with the odd spider saying hello before going on its merry way.
Foraging is not for the faint of heart when it comes to bugs. Not that they’ll harm you in any way, it's just a surprise, and possibly unpleasant for the non-bug-lovers amongst us. I’m grateful for the goods so I put up with the caterpillars and leafhoppers and odd spiders.
I was thinking of an addition to make it slightly more interesting and while smelling through my apothecary of dried herbs from last year I thought the anise hyssop, or agastache, would go very well.
So here’s my final wine from this week:
Lilac Agastache Spring Wine
Ingredients:
6 litres of lilac flowers, slightly packed
2 large pinches dried agastache leaves
Packet wine yeast of your choice*
6 quarts of water
15 blueberries
44 green grapes
½ cup strongly brewed puerh tea
8 cups sugar
2 cups lemon juice
Peel of one orange
Method:
Bring 4 quarts of water to a boil on the stove.
Add sugar, blueberries, grapes and tea to the pot and stir to dissolve the sugar.
I tried using the black parrot tulip petals that I dried as a source of colour but it wasn’t enough. Maybe if they were fresh? So blueberries again.
It is suggested to do this step before you pick and prepare your flowers so that you can allow it to cool completely while you're working on the lilacs.
2. In a large stockpot put in cleaned lilac flowers, agastache and orange peel.
Orange peel is added to “enrich the honey-nectar fragrance of the homemade wine with pleasant citric notes and slightly enhances the taste.” From Moonshiners Club recipe
3. In a 2 cup measuring cup add ½ cup room temperature water and a ladle full of the sugar water to warm it up. Add ⅓ packet of yeast and set aside to proof, 20 minutes or so.
4. When sugar water has mostly cooled (worst case, and when you're impatient, add ice cubes until it is) add the remaining 2 quarts of water to the lilacs and then pour the sugar water over. Add lemon juice.
The reason you want the water cool is because, more often than not, making a “lilac tea” with hot water seems to wreck the flavour and smell of the lilacs. This way, with cool water, it better preserves the floral aroma and taste.
5. Add the yeast and stir to distribute evenly.
6. Check that it’s fermenting in an hour or so.
7. Allow the mixture to ferment for 7-10 days and then sciphon into a sterilized jug leaving the flowers and sediment behind.
8. Ferment another 2-6 months, racking to clear as many times as you wish.
9. Wait 2-6 months before drinking. Most people wait a year for it to completely mature and have the best taste.
I’m considering making this one effervescent for fun so before I bottle it I’ll:
After you rack it for the last time into a clean fermentation jug, dissolve 2 heaping tablespoons of sugar in a small amount of warm water.
Add this to the fermentation jug and swirl round to distribute the dissolved sugar throughout.
Bottle immediately.
*I used Red Star Premier Cuvee.
And learned a new word. On the front of the packet it says for “oenological use”. I assumed that meant something to do with wine making but had never seen the word so I looked it up.
Oenology (pronounced eenology): the science and study of wine and winemaking. It is distinct from viticulture, which is concerned with the cultivation and harvest of grapes.
This lovely little packet has more than 10 billion live cells of Saccharomyces bayanas just waiting to ferment your lovely juice into wine.
While doing research on this particular strain - if you read that Dr. Vinny article apparently it is not the King of wine yeasts - I found an interesting Japanese patent crossing the two in order to produce a yeast that yields high quality wine at a low temperature.
Something we had trouble with when fermenting our chardonnay this spring. So when we were done using the seed heating mats for the seeds we put one under the wine and it started bubbling away quite happily.
There’s also an extremely interesting paper on Saccharomyces, and S. cervaise in particular.
“The production of ethanol by fermentation of juices extracted by simple pressure from fruits and other plant parts (wines) or by hydrolytic breakdown of cereal starch (beer and sake) has been the most prosperous of mankind's industries since time immemorial. It is well recognized that the main and invariable actor of these ante litteram applications of biotechnology is a yeast of the genus Saccharomyces whose species name, cerevisiae, comes directly from the Latin name for beer.
As a consequence of this important role, S. cerevisiae, the yeast species by definition, the winning protagonist of millenia of bread, wine and beer making, probably the first living being domesticated by man, is one of the best known organisms on Earth, be it physiologically, genetically, morphologically or
technologically. Unfortunately, in spite of the fact that its genome has been almost completely sequenced, two less sophisticated and advanced aspects of its biology are still surrounded by much confusion: ecology in natural environments and classification by means of conventional procedures”
Facts, Myths and Legends on the Prime Industrial Microorganism by Ann Vaughan-Martini and Alessandro Martini
More interesting still, this Herman Phaff reminds me so much of the 2 posts done by The Caterpillar Lab recently.
“Herman Phaff touched this point gently, offering every now and then indirect clues and casual hints at the danger of transforming the enrichment culture into the main and only philosophy in ecological studies.”
Compare this to:
“In short, it is complicated because we believe that cultivating a passion for monarchs ALONE can have a potential dark side. One of the central themes at The Caterpillar Lab is diversity. This diversity, which provides endless potential for discovery, endless potential to tease out new stories from seemingly mundane backyard habitats, is what inspires us and drives us forward. And the monarch butterfly provides just one of these wonderful stories, just one piece of the larger and beautiful tale of our natural world. Too often, people begin, and END, with the monarch's story. At our outreach programs, there is a small contingent of our audience that has "monarch blinders" on. In front of them are displayed upwards of 80 species of native caterpillar with stories every bit as dramatic as Danaus plexippus - but those are left unexplored and undiscovered.”
Okay, it is quite possibly only me that made any connection at all.
Only studying one thing, focusing on one thing, putting all your hopes and dreams and desire to protect and save one thing is dangerous.
It makes you myopic.
You can’t see that other things exist, potentially better, potentially exactly the same, but deserving still interest and protection and study.
We need to know more, not less. We are never done learning.
So you’ve planted milkweed.
Excellent!
Thank you for supporting the Monarch Butterfly.
Did you know that the Mottled duskywing (Erynnis martialis) butterfly is endangered in Canada?
“Habitat destruction and fragmentation caused by human development ranks as a primary threat to the mottled duskywing. Meanwhile, the plants these butterflies depend on are being eaten by deer and crowded out by invasive species. Spraying to control gypsy moth populations is also taking a toll on the mottled duskywing.”
Wildlife Preservation Canada website
There is not one yeast, there is not one butterfly, and human involvement creates less diversity not more, at least in these two cases.
It really is fascinating realizing the history involved in this discovery of yeasts and what they actually were.
Imagine if we had just left them at animaculum and decided that there was no more study necessary?
That is was just a simple, spontaneous chemical reaction?
“Our yeast superstar was actually seen only in 1684, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek sent one of his letters to the RoyalAcademy in London with the first schematic representation of 'animalcula' living in fermenting malt.
In the following 150 years, the low efficiency and scarce availability of microscopes prevented workers from reaching the logical conclusion that these oval bodies were actually responsible for the fermentation of beer.
In fact, it was only in the 1820-30s that the biological nature of the process was recognized, when a team of young biologists composed of not-yet-famous scientists was advancing the then absurd theory that a specific living organism was responsible for the transformation.
They were fiercely opposed by the powerful, prestigious and dogmatic Chemical School led by Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wohler who strongly asserted that fermentation was no more than a simple, spontaneous chemical reaction.
The fungal nature of van Leewenhoek's round bodies was first recognized in 1838 when Meyen [26] described the first yeast species assigning it a dual name according to the rules established by von Linne for animals and plants: Saccharomyces cerevisiae or 'sugar fungus of the beer'.
Not to put too fine a point on it:
“To conclude, a last recommendation to biotechnologists: do not overlook the fact that yeasts are a bottomless reservoir of biodiversity, with more to offer than the classical handful of species traditionally used or studied, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Candida albicans or Kluyveromyces lactis.”