In Toronto, some time back, we made a choice. We chose dandelions over poison when we outlawed the nasty crap that kills the dandelions. And so, our parks and lawns are filled with lovely yellow flowers and the wind blows all the seeds around the neighbourhood so everyone can enjoy them. I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the pretty yellow flowers than the poison, all things considered.
This morning, Tuffy P came up with a great idea. Now that we have the dandelions, lets make Toronto the dandelion wine capital of the universe. We could export it everywhere, “Toronto’s Finest” dandelion wine. Finally, we could be known for something besides hopeless hockey teams. Once the concept takes off, there will suddenly be a demand for dandelions. Perhaps the wineries would offer up some coin for dandelions, say so much per pound.
Right now, I have enough raw material on the front lawn for a couple bottles of top grade vino.
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Dandelion wine is delicious but of all of the different wines I have made dandelion isn’t one of them. In general country wines are embarrassingly easy to make. Dandelion is the exception in a big way. The first issue is scale. There is a lot of cleaning and sterilizing happening with winemaking and generally because of that most folks find it isnt much more work to make a 5 gallon batch than it is to make a 1 gallon batch. Except for dandelion wine. At issue is the fact that you make the wine from the flowers and the fact that even very small amounts of green will give the wine a nasty bitter flavor. So you need to pick the petals off all the flower heads. You need about 10 quarts of petals to make a 5 gallon batch of wine. I once decided to give it a go. I went out and gathered a basket of primo quality flowers and sat down in front of the tv and started to pluck. An hour later I had about a half quart done. It was gonna take me about 20 hours to do the job properly so I dumped the flowers in the compost bin. You need to gather up about 10 kids to do this job or dont bother. Well made dandelion wine is delicious but way too much work.