Dandelion wine

Dandelion wine is apparently a good thing. Or so I'm told. I enjoyed the Elderflower champagne we made last year and frankly enjoy the idea of making some more wines so given the rave review figured I'd give this one a go.

However...

This is what happened to the dandelions on my estate, thus nixing my plans to bottle my own wine from my own dandelions. Possibly this happened because I was too busy watching this

and this

doing this

Luckily enough the nearby (and slightly more extensive) grounds of Ashton Court provided rich pickings last Sunday. It was relatively cloudy and we didn't go out until mid/late afternoon so they weren't all as open as hoped, the traditional technique being to pick your dandelions at midday on a sunny day. The recipe was a combination of the last two from here, that guy seems to seriously know his stuff about wines. I'm only 3 days in on the recipe at the moment so no reports of success or failure but I'll detail the steps so far and the future plans.

Firstly, I've made just over 3 gallons from 6 litres of dandelion petals, these were pulled out of about 2 carrier bags 1/3 full each of open dandelion heads. This takes a while, put some food in the oven before you start, we had Lasagne, other foods are available. These were put into a steralised plastic brew bin and coverred with enough boiling water to make the total volume up to 3 gallons. Two days later I boiled one gallon at a time for 10 mins with the pith (no white bits) of 2 lemons and 1 orange each. This was strained back into the steralised brew bin (I had taken it all out of the brew bin before boiling the first gallon) along with a total of 2kg sugar, the juice of all 6 lemons and 3 oranges and a 900g tin of Youngs Medium White Grape juice compound. After the whole thing cooled down I added 3 tsp of wine yeast and am now waiting for fermentation to get under way.
Once fermentation starts and then settles down (assuming it goes mental at first) I'll decant the lot into demijohns, there is now about 3.4 gallons of liquid in there so I might water it down to stretch it out to 4 demijohns worth. After that I'm following recipe 3 from the above link, so will rack once the wine clears, then continue racking every 60 days so long as any sediment appears. I'm also considering bottling some when I transfer the rest to demijohns to produce fizzy dandelion 'champagne'.

Hopefully tales of great success and drunken nights to follow in some months time.