Last night, my coven mate Dora and I bottled the strawberry wine that we started as part of our Midsummer celebrations last June. Winemaking is a long-standing part of our personal practice – there is something so inherently magical (dare I say alchemical?) about turning water (and some fruit and sugar) into wine. Your intentions grow with the yeast that you so carefully nurture and then, once you are finished, you get to drink your magical potion!
This batch of wine was infused with the pure healing energies of the Midsummer Sun and the bountiful vibes of strawberries which here, in New England, count as our first harvest of the season. We hand-picked the strawberries at a local organic farm so that the wine would be our own, start to finish.
I’ve written before about how and why we like to incorporate winemaking into our craft. There’s something about long-form kitchen magic that I really enjoy. Winemaking is not for the impatient – from start to finish, a quick wine (like this one) still takes at least six to eight months. Wines that require aging then need to sit for another 3-5 years (or more!). Fruit wines like this aren’t meant to sit around for that long – our goal is to finish all 5 gallons by the end of the summer!
Don’t worry, we will have help. Presuming that it is safe to do so, Dora and I generally host a number of themed parties throughout the year. The first outdoor event of our season is our garden party that we host every year at the beginning of May in honor of my birthday and the Mayday season. We intend to turn some portion of this wine into sangria or a wine spritzer to serve for this event. I am so excited to begin the process of experimentation!
The first step, though, was getting the wine into bottles. I’ll admit that the biggest hurdle to including winemaking in your practice is the gear – you need a lot of fairly specialized equipment to make wine that is both safe to drink and tastes good. There are many blogs on the internet that say that you can make wine entirely (star to finish) in one half-gallon ball jar – don’t trust those recipes. Your wine will come out tasting yeasty and gross. Winemaking is an investment (though you can often find winemaking supplies listed on free sights if you have the patience to watch for it). At the least, to make wine that will taste good and last until its drunk you need: a primary fermenter (food-safe bucket), a secondary fermenter (glass of some kind that can be air locked), a racking cane, clean bottles, and either a bottle capper or a corker depending on your type of bottles. And that’s not including the ingredients to make the wine!
That final rack (taking the wine off of any dead yeast “cake” at the bottom of the secondary fermenter) is always the ultimate test of your wine baby. There are so many things that can go wrong that can make your wine taste “off” or be undrinkable. (Trust me – we’ve made a lot of undrinkable wine on our way to be decent winemakers)
We’ve gotten our methods down though – especially for making strawberry wine! Our strawberry wine has been our most successful repeat recipe and a general crowd favorite over the years. There is something so luscious about ripe summer strawberries that just shines through in the wine. This year’s batch is a bit drier than those we’ve had in the past but that’s totally okay – we can work with that! (When your wine is dry it just means that your yeast did a good job converting all of the sugar to alcohol)
Since our intention is to serve this wine in a cocktail anyway (you all know that I was going to make a cocktail – that’s how I roll), a dry wine actually leaves more room for experimentation. Which I started immediately. Though I don’t have any exact proportions for you, I did come up with a lovely Strawberry Wine Spritzer that is the perfect taste of Spring. For it, you will need a bottle of dry strawberry wine – this may be easy to find or not depending on where you live. Check your local winemakers if you live in an area that grows strawberries – I often have very good luck sourcing fruit wines that way. You will also need Bepi Tosolini Fragola, an Italian Strawberry liqueur. Additionally, you will want to top this drink with a Seltzer, I used a peach variety but plain would work fine.
As I said, this recipe isn’t exact because I didn’t measure it. Fill a champagne flute 2/3 full with strawberry wine, add a glug of Fragola, top with seltzer. Add a strawberry from the bottle of Fragola or a fresh strawberry for garnish and enjoy outside in the warm spring sunshine.
