Amateur Wine Making

Last summer, my wife announced that she was going to try eating dandelion leaves.  This came a little out of the blue, but I wasn't totally surprised.  In an effort to be more environmentally responsible, we stopped using herbicides on our lawn two years before this.  So, our lawn was certainly more 'natural' and we had no fears about residual herbicides on the vegetation.  My wife is always willing to try new things, and eating dandelion leaves would not be out of character.

During our conversation about this, she mentioned that one could make dandelion wine.  Now, I had always been intrigued by wine making, and this was now a challenge.  Could I make dandelion wine?  I did some research and went to work...

For this post, I'm not going to give a detailed description of my ad hoc recipe, concocted as a fusion of other dandelion wine recipes.  What I will reveal is that I think I added too much sugar.  The wine ended up being almost sickly sweet.  I can't drink it.  (My wife doesn't mind it too much.)

In the end, the failure didn't really matter much.  What I discovered was that for me, making wine was a super amount of fun.  I loved mixing up several liters of liquids, adding ingredients, watching the fermentation bubbles, adding chemicals to stabilize and protect the wine, and adding finings to make the wine crystal clear.  Bottling my own wine was incredibly satisfying.  It's also satisfying to open a bottle of your own wine and know that it tastes great and the cost to make it was a tenth of the price of a bottle of wine at the store.  I was hooked.

Dandelion Wine - 2013 vintage