make wine

Well I moved the lilac from the carboy to the bottles last night, I think I will let them sit a while longer but from the glass I had I have a pretty decent sweet lilac wine. I missed the elderflowers I wanted by a few weeks, but you know what that means elderBERRY wine. I found a pretty simple recipe online and when I was done siphoning off the lilac wine last night I strained out the elderberries (and raisons!) from that batch to add the sugar, citrus and yeast. This will be my first fruit wine because all the other attempts I have made have been floral. If all goes well I will actually exceed my expectations for this year and I will end up with 4 wines: Dandelion, Lilac, Elderberry and Hibiscus.

I may have become over zealous. I have decided to make 3 wines this year, all floral/herbals. So far I have bottled up a batch of Dandelion and I have a Lilac that is “racking up” (took me forever to find out what that meant in the recipes I was reading.)
In a few more weeks I will be going out to get Elderflower to make a sparkling wine which I tried for the first time last year with inconsistent but moderate success.

And so I wait. I think that is the truly trying part of making wine- you don’t really know how it turned out until at least 6 months later, and by then if it went wrong you have to wait again until the fruits/flowers are in season! No wonder wine making is considered a fine art, I am sure it takes years to get good at.