Lilac Wine - Simple & Sensational Home Brewed Country Wine

okee Brooks gave me the idea to try Lyle at one took me a long time to get the recipe right but get it right we have and today we're going to make some [Music] hello welcome to English country life welcome to the kitchen and welcome to may on a blustery windy day today we're going to make Lila twine the song is fabulous and by the way if you've not heard the Miley Cyrus version of lylat one that she recorded in a garden listen to them absolutely super properly acoustic properly full of emotion really liked her version of that song we're not here to do music reviews we're here to make wine Lila twine is an interesting one and I've tried loads and loads of recipes for it and I've come up with a recipe I'm going to show you today after many attempts but I wasn't entirely happy with Lila is that really resented really heady flower but flower wines can taste highly perfumed but kind of thin somehow and what I wanted was a full-bodied white wine with all those beautiful heady notes but not something that tasted acidic or / sweet or over thin and I think if you try this recipe you're gonna like it it's not complicated one a mate so let's get going and we'll show you how it's done as always we'll put the recipe up in writing at the end of the video [Music] [Music] [Music] we're gonna want three to three and a half liters of lilac blossoms to make this recipe but I mean the blossoms not all the woody Twiggy stuff so we are going to just pull off the individual flowers drop them into a liter jug so we know how many we've got and when we come across any of these brown ones we're going to leave them behind because we want the freshest most open blossoms now Lila comes in pink purple and white and different degrees of scent I've never found consistency that you know purple one smells wrong with them white ones it seems to very plant to plant and if you find that it tastes you strong for you either use less scented plant or less of the blossom I'm not gonna lie it takes an age to plot these blossoms off as you can see I'm using a liter jug just pluck them off drop the blossoms in as you go and put something decent on your phone or tablet to watch while you're doing it make I'm watching the hedge comas on YouTube the wonderful Jane sarchie accompanied by a partner in crime the fabulous Johnny who I know from a previous life brilliant Capaldi superb videos that him camping they do cook him a new farm life give him a try the hedge comas on YouTube that's three and a half liters of picked off lilac blossom yeah there is a little bit of green stuff on some of them and the odd brown petal but compared to what's in the basket much less Twiggy material in what we're going to use to Bri with what we've got to do next is get ourselves a vessel to infuse all that flavour into the what's called the must the liquid that we're going to ferment and we need to sterilize that vessel [Music] in order to thoroughly sterilized improving this all you need to do is put about an egg capital plain unscented 5% household bleach into the container thoroughly fill the container right to the brim with Queen fresh tap water and then all you have to do is leave that for 10 to 15 minutes carefully and pour away because a husband bleach you don't get it on your clothes on your palm or annoys on my sofa and thoroughly rinse the vessel I do it that vessel completely sterilized [Music] next step 500 grams of Santana's roughly chops I think the flower wines lack what Posie people call velocity velocity is that sort of body the great Winans have adding just a small bag Topsail Turner's really fixes that nice likes a slightly acid environment and there's no acid to speak of in flower petals so what we're going to do just put the juice of a couple of lemons into our mouth just to raise that acidity a little bit give the yeast a nice environment to work it also gives a refreshing summary tang to what is a white wine and that's not a bad thing last wait we've put on three liters of boiling water and give the whole thing a good stir let it stand for 48 hours to infuse all those wonderful aromas and flavors into the water [Music] what I'd love to tell you that two days gone by but actually three days ago by I could have covered that up and said oh yes two days are gone by but let's be truthful here when you live in this kind of life stuff gets in the way you get little emergencies you might not be well the kids might not be well and it's a point worth touching on with homemade country wines an extra day or two here are there an extra 10% of this ingredient or five percent less of that ingredient it doesn't matter much it really doesn't once you've stuffed got stuff into a demijohn my one advice would be if you're not sure leave it longer if your wines fermented out then you leave it an extra month it won't come to any harm if you bottle stuff too soon then yes because what's happening is you're used to still giving off gas that can blow the cork out of the bottle so you don't want to do that so it's a general rule of thumb if you're unsure of something when making wine leave a little bit longer now obviously when you've got stuff in your fermenting vessel your bucket you don't want to leave it in there for three or four months if the recipe calls for a day or two because vegetable matter in water left for several months will start to go off but instead of two days you give it three or even four it's really not the end of the world so don't worry too much about absolute precision anyway three days gone by now today we have to strain off our liquid our must interred imagem we have to add sugar we have to add yeast I'm going to add some stuff called yeast nutrient because flour wines don't always contain everything the yeast needs what I'm going to do is make a yeast starter culture which gets the East reactivated gets it all alive and bubbling and going before we put it into the wine that gets us off to a racing star I'm also going to make a sugar solution to add sugar to the wine rather than Terada is a dry ingredient and then have to try and stir it all up will dissolve the sugar in advance then add it to the wine we'll do those two things first then they can sort themselves out the yeast can get going the sugar solution gets the right temperature whilst we strain off our liquid so let's get going with that this is how I make a yeast starter culture apologies for people who watch some of our other country wine videos have you seen this before but I think it bears repeating this is just half a glass of orange juice and it's at room temperature don't use it straight out of the fridge this is general purpose Young's dried active yeast you can buy on eBay Amazon and homebrew shops and what have you there are many specialist yeasts out there for different types of wine but for general purpose country wine get a big old tub of this stuff and it will cover all your needs this is yeast nutrient yeast does need some things other than sugar and water and the trouble with flour wines particularly is they often don't contain all those nutrients now if you've added some fruit as we have here in the form of dried grapes generally you must will be fine and you don't need the yeast nutrient but it doesn't do any harm just to add a little bit so that's what we're going to do this time and all we're going to do a level teaspoon dried active yeast a level teaspoon of yeast nutrient we'll mix it up well in the room temperature orange juice and then once it's all rehydrated and dissolved and even begun to bubble we can mix that into the wine it's one teaspoon of yeast and a level teaspoon of the yeast Newton which almost looks a bit like sugar so that's just a white crystallized powder give it a really good stir like these long-handled sundaes things a lot of things we did in the kitchen they're very handy to get to the bottom well and we'll just leave that side now for about 15 minutes giving it an occasional stir the next step that we're going to take is to make a sugar solution so rather than putting granulated sugar into a wine you can see this stuff that I've guys be quite old and gone lumpy the trouble with putting that into the wine liquid is it's very hard to get it to dissolve now we've only used three litres of water and our Wireless and our demijohn will hold over four litres so we can make up a liter of sugar solution add it to our strained wine last and still not fill the damage on so if we pre dissolve this sugar it makes life a lot easier so for our recipe seven hundred grams of sugar that's not a lot for a country wine that a pound and a half and we're going to dissolve that in just half a litre of boiling water that's actually less volume of water than we've got sugar but from my beekeeping days I can tell you you can dissolve two kilos of sugar you know litre of water fairly easily so this will dissolve very easily and what I'll end it is that a bit of cold water to cool it down to room temperature no more than another half litre but you can see already that that's almost dissolved [Music] here's our liquid you can probably see the sort of raisin Sultana dried grapes have plumped up the blossoms have all wilted and the waters taken on a really nice of a golden e color so that means that our solids have given up all their flavors to the water and what we need to do now strain off the solids and we're going to do that in two stages we're going to do a course training where we get out the big lumps and then a fine straining the core straining just through a sieve or colander the fine straining through some cloth we'll start with a spare clean bucket and a large colander anything will do though sieve kitchen colander whatever you've got something large ish with holes in it now if you haven't got a steady hand veil it over with a jug finally once you think the dripping is stopped take a clean hand and press on your solids it's not always a good idea to do this in certain types of recipe but in this recipe it's absolutely fine and you want to squeeze out everything you can that's the color of liquid you're going to end up with it's very cloudy we will show how to clear all this at a later point but before we carry on we're now going to strain it through some cloth to get rid of any fine particles the more particles we get rid of at this stage the easier it is to clear later here's how we're going to do the fine straining we take a queen sterilized Demi jump just sterilize for the splasha bleach filled with water left for 15 minutes rinse twice on top of that a large basic funnel top of the funnel we're going to put a sieve but on top of the sieve I'm going to put two layers of Muslim but any fine cloth will do and then the Muslim will catch little fine parts of liquid that the sieve itself wouldn't catch because my target is smaller yeah absolutely we will use the jug to transfer the liquid across from the bucket and strain it through the cloth that liquids now hardly running at all and the reason that the liquids hardly running is the cloth is actually choked with sediment now we can always move the cross around and see that there's bits off to the side so when that happens pull the cloth gently across a little bit and give it a clean bit for the liquid to run through before you put the next jug full through rinse the cloth under the tap get rid of all that sediment now this may seem a bit sort of painstaking but trust me settling that stuff out later will be a real chore doing it now is going to pay dividends later that's what we're left with after one liter going through the cloth I'll rinse that under the tap now and do another leisure and it honestly doesn't take too long but had we tried to pour it at the very beginning through the cloth it would have choked instantly with all those big petals and sultanas and whatnot in the mix so the coarse filter and then fine filter is really worth doing trust me on this here's our three components then we only added three litres of water if you remember to our wine must our liquid so only two-thirds fills the demijohn and we did that so we can now add our sugar syrup and our yeast starter culture and it still won't be quite full I do that deliberately a lot of the time with these country wines the initial fermentation is quite violent and that means you get a lot of froth if you fill your damager right up to sort of here which is the full line that froth can force its way through the airlock if you initially leave yourself plenty of what's called headspace what that means is it can froth up a bit and after three or four days that all dies down and you just top it up with some room-temperature water to the level that you want and you don't risk that sort of blowing through the but do ticular got a lovely wine must here our sugars gone clear you can see a layer of froth at the top of the orange juice that shows that our yeast starter culture is actively fermenting if you haven't got orange juice but a cup of tea spoonfuls of sugar in some warm water and use that instead it'll work absolutely fine so what we're going to do now making sure everything is at room temperature is we're going to add the sugar solution first and then we're going to add the starter culture to our demijohn you need a steady hand for this bit you can see why a funnel is useful the great advantage of adding our sugar syrup rather than putting granulated sugar into the wine is we know it's fully dissolved we can see our yeast starter is actively from empty look at those bubbles give it a good stir make sure you picked up anything off the bottom pour that in the next step is to give the whole thing a good stir you can't be a meat skewer for doing that in a demi jump get all that yeast and sugar beautifully mixed up with a wine must now you can see here why I said about leave that top space so our measurements have allowed a good top-up with probably 500 750 ml extra water in a few days once the initial violent violent fermentation has stopped now the last part of our preparation is to fit an airlock what an airlock does is water in these two chambers goes up to about there as gas pushes its way up it forces it round into one chamber and a bubble Rises through fermentation causes a lot of carbon dioxide gas give off if you don't put an airlock in and just leave this open what will happen is if vinegar fly will come along they're attracted by the smell of fermentation it'll circle itself into that liquid it carries on it something called a cito bacteria and that bacteria will consume all the alcohol you wine and turn it into vinegar now I make vinegar and under controlled conditions that's a great thing to do but I also like to drink a glass of wine so I don't want all my wine turns to vinegar so the airlock if a vinegar slide tries to get in it basically drowns in that chamber and it keeps it out of the wine in a moment I'm going to put that demijohn on a lovely warm windowsill and by tomorrow morning I'll hear of carbon dioxide passing through the airlock showing me that fermentation is happening and that will carry on for two or three weeks once it slows down to less than one bubble every 60 seconds fermentation is complete and we can clear and bottle the wine and that's it there's nothing complicated but what you get at the end is a wine you can't buy don't care how wealthy you are it's really really hard to go out and find lylat wine and on a summer's day under a willow tree a chilled glass of Lila's wine is just absolutely incredible try it I promise it really is a life-changing kind of experience if you enjoy these kind of videos can you spare us five seconds for thumbs up down below and if you want to see more of this sort of stuff we're just coming up to elderflower season now I've shown elderflower wine in the past but would you like to see how the flower cordial how about elderflower champagne that is something very very special let us know in the comments and if you want to see these kind of videos hit the subscribe button down there the bell icon next to it you'll hear every time we upload a new video but whatever you do come back and see us soon take care [Music] you [Music]

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 8,719

Keywords: Country Wine, Home Made Wine, Homebrew, Hedgrow Wine, Smallholder, Smallholding, GYO

Id: 0zR2OEKnJ5A

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020