Country Wines and Foraging

[oldbloke]

Sorry if its been posted but did a search and only beer came up, does anyone have a good recipe for a quickish nettle wine? I will be freeing up a demi john this afternoon and have my bucket at the ready to collect!!

This is what I did last year, came out OK, prolly go for slightly less sugar and more nettle tops this year:

2011-05-02: Picked half a gallon of nettle tops. Washed, simmered 45min with a bit of lemon zest and soem ginger.
Strained onto 2lb12oz sugar, juice of lemon, crushed campden tablet, nutrient. Made up to gallon with boiled water. Left to cool.
2011-05-03: Pitched yeast. Half pack Gervin GV5
2011-06-26: Racked. Still bubbling.
2011-07-22: Bottled (with sorbate+campden): pleasant. Slightly sweet
2011-08-14: I like this one

 

[hedgerow pete]

i find that 10 % brown sugar really helps with this sort of wine normally a 100gm is more than enough, demerrar use 50 gm as its a very strong taste, but a great add

 

[alanywiseman.]

Going to start picking tomorrow and freeze the tips as I go. Fingers crossed I should be able to get a gallon or two of nettle wine on the go next weekend.

Thanks for all the help everyone, I will be back asking more foraging questions :thumb:

 

[hedgerow pete]

why do we want to freeze the tips ?

the standard is to pick a bucket load of tips and them go home and cover the lot in 3 litres of boiling water, currants, sugar and acids, leave for a day to naturually cool then add the activated yeast. this is then left "on the pulp" in the bucket with a lid for a week and then drained through a sieve and into a demijohn and topped up and left to fermentate.

what we are basicly making here is a tea wine, all leaf wines are a basic "tea" we just get the tea from different leaves and then we ferment as normal,

everyone should try straight nettle tea its great from you, i have it loads of times a great natural tea,

try it stuff two sprigs of nettle tops in a cup, add boiling water, leave for 5 mins, remove leafs and drink, us weired black tea drinkers love it

freezing shatters the the cell, so we wouold do that for a fruit wine or some thing that contains a juice that we want to remove from the plant structure.

buy a pack of marigolds and use them to pick with, the chemical that does the damage is heat sensitive so when we pour on boiling water it no longer stings,

 

[hedgerow pete]

oops forgot to mention, you might not realise how to pick nettle tips either so may i suggest a sensible meathod ?

we need to collect from the middle of the biggest clump, away from the piddle areas :sick: ,

my way is to wear a pair of jeans, dont worry if its deep as we want eith a pair of wellies with the trousers tuck in or we use a pair of elastic bands to hold them tight, as we dont want them ridding up now do we ! :pray: :pray: :pray:

walk a step into the nettles away from the dog piddle and as i said earlier we are ONLY PICKING TIPS and no more we definattle never ever pick single leaves off stems either yuck :sick:

and we then make our hand into a sock puppet face the idea is that we only pick what is inside the fingers to

try to tink of a sock puppet and how we hold the hand with the fingers straight the idea is then the tip then sits inside the length of the fingers, pinch and then twist if you have a weak pull. rest the open carrier bag on the top of the nettles and then go mad, i can get a right speed going, a bag should that only a few minutes to pick

 

[alanywiseman.]

Thanks for all the great advice pete.

I was talking about freezing because I thought it would take a while to collect enough nettles but from what you say that is not the case.

Recipe does 900g sugar, 100g brown sugar, 250g saltanas plus the usual acid, tannins and nutrient sound ok?

Pete: Do you include orange and lemon in your wine? I see a lot of recipes do, what is your take on it?

 

[hedgerow pete]

because its a tea leaf wine we are going to be short of acids but will have tannins in the mix(tell me if its to indepth for you or over the head jobbie)

in all the old recipes and we are now looking at a recipe thats any where from at least 40 years old 1970's minium, to say 100 years old, if not more, nettle were a country food group basic for thousands of years so as we would not have bean able to pop to the local home brew store of a tin of acid, we use the cloures rind and juice from citris fruits, i personal like to use the orange and lemons as it was writen in the recipe that way, but a pinch of acid will do, and any way after its fermented if its still weak we can always add another pinch to the finished wine to sharpen it up.

 

[alanywiseman.]

I just bit the bullet!!!

The must for my first nettle wine is made and has been left to cool :party: I decided that i should just go for it and get the nettles picked so when i was walking my dog i managed to fill a poly bag full. It ended up filling a 5L PET bottle to the top all be it they were loosely packed. Trying to keep it very simple I used nutrient, citric acid, and sugar (60g of which was derarema). It is now cooling as I type (back at work) and I will pitch tomorrow.

Note to self (and an other idiots reading this thread!): DO NOT POUR BOILING WATER INTO A PET BOTTLE. Yes that is what I did It now seems more like a 3.5L PET than a 5 but live and learn.

Just a quick question: Should I have washed the nettle tips? I was going to but then thought F it and just made the must. Now wish I had washed them.

Once again thanks for all the help and i will keep you up to date with future endevors (unless you dont want to hear them in which case just tell me to p*ss off :lol: )

 

[screamlead]

Yep should always rinse em, never know what beasties are crawling inside although boiling hot water should have killed anything.
I just came down from my roof where my vines are like triffids, felt something crawling down my back - took t shirt off and hey presto massive big green beetle type bug crawled out!!!! :shock:

 

[hedgerow pete]

rinse in a cualender as per a salad leaf is standard

 

[alanywiseman.]

oops

Oh well, live and learn. Going to try and collect more nettles to put on another batch tomorrow but with the addition of some ground ginger. I am very excited about these wines. Like Hedgerow Pete said this is a slippery slope and I am already hurtling down it at a rate of knots :lol:

 

[hedgerow pete]

the main thing for me is the lack of costs for the ingreadiants, apart from buying sugar and oranges or lemons and occasionly raisans, its completely cost free, i also get the day or afternoon outside in the fresh air with the dogs and generally have a great time collecting the ingrediants, alot of the ingrediants are waste products anyway, broad bean tips and shelled pea pods, nettle tops and bramble tops, flower heads and fruit and veg,

it got so bad the one year that i started to go to a friendly fruit and veg stall in the market at 4 pm on a saturday to buy what was going to not last the weekend, i came home with some fanstatic deals, 20 punettes of strawbs and a whole 5 kg box of black cherries,, it was a case of take whats goings and find a recipe when you get home, once its in the bucket fermenting you dont have to worry about it going off

 

[Cononthebarber]

This was a well good thread to read and given a bunch of ideas, I reckon there will be a load of "hedgerow" brews on the horizon :)

Im gonna start with a nettle wine me thinks but any ideas for this time of year in particular?

 

[Cononthebarber]

Alright! So a 2 minute walk from my house I have found the motherload to end all motherloads of nettles! Guess what I'm making as soon as I bottle my cider? :) can i use cider yeast? or does it have to be wine yeast, I have a few sachets youngs cider yeast but no wine...

It reminds me of when I was growing up (the nettles not the yeast), I grew up in a small village which had a really big hill along the main street. Every year we had a village go kart race down the hill and one year this bloke from a neighbouring village joined in. About halfway down the hill his brakes failed and he went careening into a large embankment which happened to be absolutely full of nettles! He won the race...he also broke his arm, gave himself concussion and landed in a nettle forest, owch!!! Don't think we had anymore go kart races after that...

 

[alanywiseman.]

Got mine started this week :thumb:

I found this the other day which you may find handy HERE

i think if you use cuder yeast it will definetly change the flavour. You could do one with cider and one with wine to see the difference?

 

[Cononthebarber]

I may give that a go...or just buy the wine yeast as have some more cider ideas going on in my head...I feel I need to reel myself in a little as I now have 3 plastic fermenting bins (with two more on the way ordered today!)...the missus became suspicious last night when I was "rearranging" the loft to make more space!

 

[hedgerow pete]

any old yeast will do, beer cider or wine, just bung it in and let it go on its own

 

[Cononthebarber]

How about bread making yeast? I have two packs of it which I have no use for, could I use that?

 

[RobWalker]

maybe for beer, but that's likely to have a low alcohol tolerance meaning it'll drop out before fermentation finishes leaving a wine with a low abv and too sweet.

you can buy montrachet from wilko's/lhbs and it's cheap as hell and extremely useful. I make my wine and cider with it!

 

[hedgerow pete]

bread yeast is not a good idea for wines, sorry you have luckd out there