I bottled my dandelion wine today. It had been settling and clearing for 3 and a half months and was looking nice and clear, so I figured it was time.
First step (after cleaning the bottle and all equipment) was to transfer the wine from the carboys into bottles.
It’s just transferring with a siphon. You put one end of the tube in the carboy and then suck on the other end until you get wine. Unlike siphoning gas, it’s an added bonus when you get a mouthful. Put the other end in your empty wine bottle and the wine flows. On the bottle end there’s a little gadget that when you lift the hose out of a full bottle it stops the flow until you press against the inside of the next bottle. Slick.
After the bottles are filled it’s time to cork them. In the good old days they pounded the cork in with a hammer. In these modern times I get out yet another gadget to cork the bottles.
You put the cork in the gadget and press the handles down and it pushes the cork into the bottle. It takes a pretty good push to seat the cork. If you’re not careful to keep yourself square to the bottle and push evenly, the whole contraption can go skittering across the counter with wine and profanity flying everywhere.
When buying store bought wine, I usually make my selections based on the attractiveness of the label. I’ll be sure to enjoy my dandelion wine more with a nice label.
Who could resist that bottle?
This is all very nice, but what about what really matters? How does it taste? Let’s find out.
Debbie said it tasted like drinking dandelion greens. Using winespeak you could say it is overly vegetal. Either one of those is a fairly accurate assessment. It’s not unpleasant to drink, at least if you like dandelion greens, but it definitely has too much green taste. I left the wine sit on dandelions about 6 days which must’ve been too much.
I can sum it up with a quote from the best movie ever, “quaffable but far from transcendent.”
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