Dandelion wine and mead

Ok not really a post about beer.

Mrs Velkyal decided earlier this year that she would like to make dandelion wine, so on Tuesday it was decided that we buy a 5 litre bottle of cheap Italian wine - see a previous post - and start the process.

Before chucking the wine down the toilet we decided to try a bit, just in case it was worth drinking. To put it bluntly it was the most awful wine either of us had ever tried. It was so comically bad that it reminded me of a Ukrainian wine I bought in Birmingham way back at college. But a 7 euros for 5 litres what do you expect? We only wanted the bottle anyway.

So sitting in the flat is a bottle with dandelion petals and slithers of lemon and orange - it will sit there for another 8 days, doing whatever it is it does, before being filtered into a primary fermenter and having wine yeast pitched in. We are hoping for some yeast from Moravia for this, but we also bought some commercially available from the UK. Apparently this wine will be ready just in time for Christmas.

Next week I will be going through the process of buying a bottle of awful wine again, this time with the intention of making a cinnamon infused mead. Also for Christmas.