Mint was one of Spring’s harbingers together with the asparagus. I grow mint in the cinder blocks fencing the asparagus bed. This year I ventured into herbal wine-making.
The process was simple and the equipment and supplies readily available. I purchased two gallon jugs at a local flea market for $4.98 each, Gallon brewing bottles are also available on line. Additional supplies needed include an air lock and champagne yeast from Amazon. The ingredients list included mint leaves, sugar, orange juice, filtered water and the wine yeast.
The recipe called for sterile utensils and containers as you would need for any canning or fermentation process. I sterilized the gallon container in which I would mix the ingredients, filtered a gallon of tap water and put it on to boil. Earlier I had picked 4 cups of mint leaves which I washed and stripped from their stems.
- Proof one package wine yeast (2 tsp.) by adding it to a cup of warm (100 degree) orange juice. The yeast will begin to foam (proof) that it is alive and active as it feeds on the sugars in the juice. If the orange juice is too hot, it will kill the yeast. Make sure it is barely warmer than body temperature to activate.
- Put 4 cups sugar in the sterilized gallon jar and add two cups of the boiling filtered water to the jug and swirl to dissolve the sugar.
- Stuff mint leaves through the neck of the gallon jar and then pour the boiling water through a funnel into the jar leaving enough room to add the proofed yeast after the mixture has cooled to 90 –100 degrees.
- Stopper the bottle with a sterilized air lock and watch for the wine mixture to begin to bubble up through the lock in about an hour. If the mixture fails to bubble within a few hours, the yeast was probably killed. If this happens, just proof another packet of yeast in orange juice and add to the fledgling wine.
After the wine stops bubbling up into the stopper, rack the wine. This process siphons the fermented product into a clean container in order to separate the new wine from the dregs. I found that a racking cane which keeps the lees from being sucked into the new container makes this process simple.
When most of the new wine has been transferred to a clean container, tilt the bottle to access more of the wine while avoiding the lees. Discard the dregs or compost them and sanitize the used bottle and racking equipment before using them on the next batch of wine.
This process may be repeated at intervals before bottling until the wine clears although cloudy wine, like imperfect fruit, is still perfectly fine to consume.
When the wine clears, bottle it in sterilized bottles. Bottles are available new, or use recycled wine bottles that have been thoroughly sterilized.
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