White, red, and… green?

These are a few of the products from my latest project idea. Folk wine. I read up on it a while ago, and decided that it sounded like something worth trying. The “white” wine is actually an herbal wine made with a dry chamomile flower infusion and blackberry honey. It is a dessert wine, with a slight bitterness. I don’t actually have a hydrometer yet, so I’m not sure about the ABV percentage. The “red” wine is an apple-raspberry combination where I used organic unfiltered apple juice and added raspberries into the fermentation tank. In my opinion, it is perfect. I think I prefer it over some Zinfadels because it seems like it has a more refreshing fruitiness to it than do grapes. The “green” wine is a super sweet herbal wine made with whole fresh dandelion heads and chammomile blossoms. The sugar is raw demerara cane sugar. I think that I will use a lot less sugar next time and see how it tastes dry. The last mysterious concoction is “Licorice wort”, and I came up with the entire recipe myself. I used various herbs (about 6 or 7), 4 of which resemble the flavor of candy licorice, and then I used molasses for the sugar fermenter. It is really sweet as well– it tastes like drinking candy, but it also has a good kick to it, and both of those reasons are why I chose to put it in a shot glass instead. Over all, I think it is a great project to keep me going for the summer. This week I batched some more wines because of how amazing these turned out. I just need to balance my sugar levels better.

Hmm 🙂 I just did a mini-wine-tasting, and they definitely affect me the same as commercial wine 🙂 I have a happy buzz right now. The new batches I made this week are: White grape, dry and dessert, hard-apple-cider (wine), a mix of the two (hopefully it’s not terrible), huckleberry, hibiscus, hard-iced-tea (peach with raspberry), and some purple sake that I made with some exotic black rice. Hopefully in a month I will post another digital wine-tasting 🙂