Dandelion Scion

Spring has settled in long enough in these parts for my favorite weed to have made an appearance. No, not that one. I mean the dandelion. (What lawn monoculture enthusiast first declared it a weed anyway?) Not only are they pretty, but – more importantly – they are tasty. All parts of the plant can be eaten, most commonly raw in mixed salads, though I’m told the roots are better boiled. I’ve never collected enough roots at one time to bother boiling them, so I’ll pass that opinion along without personally confirming it. Beware of chemical contamination of course. I never use fertilizers, pesticides or weed killers on my lawn, so this is not an issue in my yard.

 
Both sets of my grandparents made dandelion wine, but by the 1970s when I was old enough to drink it they had retired from recreational fermentation. I have all of their winemaking equipment stored in my barn, but I’ve never tried to make wine of any kind myself. Fortunately, up through the 1990s I had friends and coworkers whose families did have an old vintner in the mix, so I was gifted with a bottle of dandelion wine every few years until the current century. I guess the old relatives died off by 2000. Plenty of people still made (and make) it of course, but they were not among the gifting/regifting circle of my friends and coworkers by then, so my free supplies dried up.
 
What does it taste like? Unsurprisingly, the bottles I’ve sampled varied a lot, but at bottom each was more similar to mead (which is fermented from honey) than to other white wines, though not as sweet as that comparison makes it sound. All tasted more alcoholic than they possibly could have been. Alcohol kills yeast and thereby shuts down fermentation at about 13% ABV. (You need to use distillation to increase alcohol content over this.) So, the apparent extra kick has to come from other aspects of the dandelion.
 
Most online recipes for dandelion wine are pretty similar. The biggest differences are in the amount of straining and aging. One site urges re-filtering, rebottling, and then aging for two years. I don’t think any of the home winemakers who ever supplied me directly or indirectly did that. Most sites suggest letting it age in the bottle for two months, which sounds more probable, though it is possible I received some bottles on the very day they were corked.
 
These recipe ingredients are pretty typical:
3 liters dandelion flowers – just the petals; any green bits will add bitterness
500 grams of raisins – preferably golden, but any will do
4.5 liters of water
Yeast – either bread or wine yeast; these packets are readily available
1.2 kg of sugar
Zest of orange
 
Some recipes add a bit of this or that – or fiddle with the fermentation with yeast nutrient and acid blend – but doing that or not is up to you. Put the petals in a nonreactive fermenting container (e.g. glass or ceramic rather than aluminum or iron), pour in boiling sugar water, add the other ingredients, and lid the fermenter. You can buy specialized fermenting equipment and valves or just use glass bottles or jugs capped with balloons – pinpricking the balloons will allow excess gases to escape while still preventing outside air from entering the bottle. I suggest consulting one of the many online recipe sites for the precise steps and probable fermentation times.
 
Since I mentioned distillation, can that be done to dandelion wine to make moonshine? Yes. I’ve heard of it but never have tried it. But if you prefer hard spirits, there is nothing preventing this step, though the result should taste more like brandy than whiskey.
 
I’ll leave all this fermenting and distilling to others more ambitious than I. For now, I’ll just snatch some flowers and mix them into my Caesar salad. I’m not averse to uncorking a bottle this summer, however, if one is sent my way.

 

The Hollies – Dandelion Wine