Perfect Parsnip Wine - the best country wine there is ! (Part 1)

this isn't the chardonnay it's not a semi-old it's not a pinot grigio but it tastes every bit as good as any of them this is parsnip wine [Music] hello welcome to english country life welcome to the garden on a bit of a grey spring day but not too bad welcome to making parsnip wine now we've all heard about elderflower we've tried elderberry but very few people these days have tried parsnip wine but those who have those who know will tell you just how fabulous it is and today i want to welcome you into the inner circle who know how to make proper parsnip wine so join us today to learn the secrets in stage one we go dig up some parsnips [Music] so [Music] i don't think we're going to be doing too much in the way of outside jobs today so let's make some parsnip wine first job then is to prepare two kilos of parsnips for each damage on a wine a demijohn is a gallon four and a half liters six bottles of wine whatever units or measurement you prefer i'll put a recipe up at the end so don't bother writing stuff down i promise it'll all be there at the end of the video [Music] that's a couple of kilos of parsnips scrubbed and trimmed next job we need to simmer them until they're just tender we don't want them to turn to mush because that'll stop the wine clearing two kilos is a fair old size of parsnips and they won't fit in a sort of domestic large powder like that so i use a 17 litre stock pan to do this stage if you haven't got a pan that big don't worry you can still do this just cut the pasta off in a couple of batches that's all we need now that lot is filling up a pan up to about the eight nine liter marks if you can get a pan that big so much the better i'm just going to bring them up to a gentle simmer and cook them till they're soft while our parsnips are simmering away though i've measured out 1.25 kilos one and a quarter kilograms of plain white sugar just granulated is fine and i've also got 500 grams of raisins and i'm going to roughly chop them i add raisins to the wine because they had what's called vinosity in posy circles just means it makes the drink a bit more wine like gives it a bit more mouth feel and raisins are cheap so we're going to chop up 500 grams or a pound whichever you like of raisins and add them to the mix i'm just going to roughly chop these raisins i'm not trying to do a precise job on it just open them up so the flavors can come out of the raisin and into the liquid i want to start my fermentation off in a white brewing bucket for four or five days if i do it in a damage on the risk is the fermentation is so violent that it just boils through that airlock and it bubbles everywhere and it makes a right old mess so i'm gonna use this just for a few days what i'm gonna do is sterilize it by putting an egg cap full of bleach in just plain unscented household bleach fill it with water leave it for 15 minutes rinse it out twice it'll be absolutely sterile and good to go yeast really likes acidity and now parsnips don't have much acidity in it so i'm going to add the juice of a couple of oranges to the parsnip wine ordinary orange juice out of the cartons absolutely fine i just want to get that acidity up a little bit and honestly the orange juice doesn't hurt the flavor at all either [Music] [Music] right our parsnips they're cooked they're soft but they've not turned the mush it's the liquid though in there that we actually want to make our wine so we need to add that hot liquid to the sugar to dissolve the sugar we'll add the raisins in as well and that'll start to swell the raisins and get them to give up all their flavors we mustn't add the yeast yet because hot liquid boiling liquid will kill the yeast so what i'm going to do sugar and raisins into the sterilized clean and rinse bucket colander over the top pour the liquid from the parsnips through the colander catching the parsnips because we don't need to put them into the wine now and then give it all a good stir dissolve up that sugar those parsnips by the way perfectly fine brilliant for soup put them in and roast them they're still great all we want is that liquid off them [Music] i'm going to give it a really good stir so i want to make sure that all that sugar has dissolved fully excuse me groveling on the floor it's the easiest way to show this to you one advantage of these brewers buckets is that they have a scale on the side for how much is in them and what we want in this bucket right now is about five liters i know that seems a bit counterintuitive because i said a demijohn holds four and a half liters bear in mind the raisins and stuff are still in there so when we strain off the liquid in a few days there'll be a bit less volume than there is in the bucket right now so if you've got a bridge bucket top it up with cool water to around about the five liter mark if you haven't don't worry about it leave it as it is when we strain it off put it in your damage on and add the cool water then to make it up to a full damage on now we've got to wait for our wine muscle there's a fancy term parsnip water raisins and sugar to come down to room temperature but while it does i want to get our yeast working i'm going to use dried general purpose wine yeast for this recipe i'll buy it in big tubs it does most country wines perfectly well you don't need fancy sachets or anything else but it comes in a dried format and therefore it takes a while to wake up well we don't want to put it in that hot water because the hot water will kill it but we got this orange juice that we squeezed don't we and that is perfect for rehydrating dried one yeast it's acid it's got fruit sugars in it to feed the yeast and after about 20 minutes in a nice sort of warm room temperature glass of orange juice you'll see it start to bubble so we're going to do that next i'm also going to add a level teaspoon of yeast nutri to be truthful on this recipe you don't need it right you've got parsnip water you've got sugar you've got the raisins you've got the orange juice there's more than enough in there to feed the yeast but i buy the stuff anyway while i've got it on hand i might as well chuck a teaspoon fuller and make sure that he's happy if you haven't got any don't buy it for this recipe you don't need it honestly but if you have got some it doesn't hurt just put a teaspoon full in this is the stuff i'm using just young's general purpose wine yeast and young's yeast nutrient you can buy it almost anywhere that's what the yeast looks like very similar to the stuff you use in bread making yeast nutrient looks for all the world like sort of sugar really i suppose or something like that put a little teaspoon of each of those in and we'll give it a good stir okay our wine must is cooling our yeast starter culture is rehydrating and getting all energized there's just two more ingredients i want to talk to you about because this i promise you is going to be a fabulous wine it's going to be clear it's going to be gold and dark it's going to be rich and full of subtle nuanced flavors i promise you like a really good chardonnay right but we just need to put a little bit of effort in to get it there so first thing parsnips contain pectin pectin's the stuff that makes your jam set it also makes your wine cloudy if you don't mind your wine being cloudy you can skip this step but if you do when you get your wine you just get some of this pectic enzyme we're going to put a little bit in the wine must in a minute and all it's going to do is break down the pectin make the wine clear that's all we need to know the other thing that really good wine house is tanning it's that stuff that in tea makes your teeth feel a bit coated and it exists particularly in the skins of grapes now we'll get some tanning because we'll get it off the raisins but they're not really wine grapes so i like to up the tannin a little bit you can buy fancy powdered wine tanning but we're not going to do that i've got here a cup of strong black tea and we're going to put three tablespoons of strong black tea into a wine that's all it needs it's not a lot but it just ups that tan and gives it that richness and depth and mouth feel a really good white wine some people will put their pectic enzyme directly in the wine mast i like to dissolve it first it's just a sort of crystal white crystal and i'm gonna mix it up in half a glass of sort of lukewarm water when it's fully dissolved i'll pop that into the wine mast here's our orange juice with our yeast and our yeast nutrient in it what we call a yeast starter culture and you can see that there's bubbles forming on the surface but you can also see there's a bit of sediment down the bottom so now that we're sure that the yeast is activated what i'm going to do is keep stirring it to mix all of that in and then i'm going to add it to the wine must our wine mask is nice and cool now so let start adding ingredients this is strong black tea that i'm adding just to get those tannin levels up next we put the pectic enzyme in hexalase as it's also known just to break down those long strands finally good old stu of the yeast starter culture it goes stir up the brewing bucket i know the wine musk looks dark brown now okay i'm aware trust me it'll be absolutely fine it's going to come out to a great white wine color by the time it's finished that's a gallon of wine must ready to go i'm just going to put it somewhere warm now i'm going to stir every day just to agitate those raisins and get all the flavors coming together and melding as soon as that violent fermentation is over i'm going to strain it off put it into a demijohn and we'll finish the fermentation in the damage on well away from any vinegar flies although to be honest at this time of year sub freezing temperatures with the snow going down outside thankfully flies are not so much of a problem as they are in the peak of summer the thing with this is it's actually really easy it's taken me much longer to show it and to film it than it does to do it the only time consuming bit digging up the parsnips and doing the old sort of scrub and trim and getting them ready for cook down but truthfully it wouldn't take much longer to do five gallons as it did to do one gallon and because parsnips are really simple to grow and they're even simple to create the seed form we've got a video on seed saving parsnips i'll put the link up there this is a wine you can make in quantity for almost no money at all if you want a delicious dry white wine get you through the summer now's the time to make it so off to put that somewhere warm four or five days stir it every day this is the wine must the next day you can see that all the solid matter has floated to the surface so what we're looking at here is a lot of yeast we're looking at the chopped raisins etc and if you look carefully you can also see bubbles popping up through that sort of crust of solid matter and that's the carbon dioxide given off by fermentation i'm going to give it a good stir just to keep everything well agitated and you can see the bubbles rising up now from the liquid and that shows us that fermentation is well underway we're going to leave our parsnip wine there for now bubbling away to itself in its fermenting vessel we'll come back in a week's time and we'll show you how we strain out all the solids how we filter it and clear it and bottle it it's gonna make a fabulous wine i know at this stage doesn't sound or look that promising so take a sneak peek at how this wine ends up looking for a minute doesn't that look fabulous and it tastes better than it looks just got to hold your nerve with parsnip one if you've enjoyed today's video can you spare us five seconds give us a thumbs up down below in a week's time we'll put up the rest of the parsnip wine video how to get rid of the solids how to filter it and clear it and polish it and bottle it and cork it it's gonna be great i absolutely promise you if you'd like to see that and all the other videos we make on self-sufficient country living just whack on that subscribe button hit the bell next to it and you'll hit every time we upload a new video and don't be afraid tell us in the comments what you want to see and we'll try and make you those kind of videos but whatever you do come back and see us soon take care [Music] you

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 13,064

Keywords: Home Brew, Home Made Wine, Country Wine, Homebrew, Hedgerow wine

Id: sVL4yU6sRB8

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021