“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue,” wrote Ray Bradbury in his collection of short stories, aptly titled Dandelion Wine. “The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”
The golden-hued drink—a concoction of dandelions fermented with yeast and sugar—does indeed capture the essence of a sunny day. “Making dandelion wine is a rite of spring,” says Danny Childs, an ethnobotanist and author of Slow Drinks, a book about transforming foraged items into beverages. “I really look forward to both making it and enjoying it. You wait all winter for things to start growing again, then dandelions appear; they’re the symbolic birth of spring.”
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While the plant is a weed to many, dandelions have been transformed into wine for centuries. In the 1600s, European colonists brought dandelions with them as they journeyed to America. This was for a few reasons: they could eat the greens and dandelions were an abundant source of flavoring and naturally occurring yeast, “meaning, they could make their own wine,” Childs explains.
But somewhere along the way, Americans’ view of the plant shifted from that of a reliable resource into pesky nuisance—wars have long been waged to eliminate the golden “weed” from verdant, monochromatic lawns. Recently, however, foragers have been increasingly returning to the plant’s roots by way of homemade dandelion wine.
What is Dandelion Wine?
Like grape wine, dandelion wine is a fermented drink.
“After fermentation, dandelions leave
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
