After the success of last year’s plum wine, which we’re having to ration ourselves on, we’ve decided this year to turn our hand to the king of country wines: nettle. We should have got around to it sooner on two accounts. First, it’s a bit of a must-do for self-sufficiency, really, as it’s so widely known-about. And second, nettles are so plentiful it’s good to see them being put to some use.
As an added bonus it feels good to get out there and hack some down. So often then spoil our fun when we’re out geocaching that I’m happy to be getting some slight revenge on them.
So at the weekend I headed out with gloves and scissors and a plastic bag to start collecting. This isn’t as simple as it sounds as you have to be quite picky. You want young nettles, ideally, which haven’t yet gone to seed. You don’t want to harvest them from too close to paths where dogs may have relieved themselves onto them and you don’t want to pick them from right under trees where birds could have done the same.
It took a while but eventually I’d picked myself a full bag, which when I got it home and weighed it came to a measly 450g. Not great. Nonetheless, after washing off the bugs and shaking dry the leaves there was still too much for the stock pot and almost too much for the jam pan, too.
Washed nettles in the jam pan
A successful nettle wine can’t be made from nettles alone: all the online forums insist that you need to add some rind and fruit to give it some decent flavour, so to this we added a generous handful of raisins, the rind of two lemons and two oranges, and an 18g piece of ginger root, which I bashed fairly comprehensively with a rolling pin beforehand to break it up and release the flavour.
To this I added 6 litres of water and then I set it boiling.
Slowly.
Jam pans aren’t great at insulating their contents. With a wide open rim you’ve got no chance of putting a lid on top so all the heat goes straight up and out. It took 45 minutes to get it up to boiling point, after which it had to simmer for a further 50. It felt like ages.
With frequent stirring, though, the contents soon bedded down and we were left with a rather unappetising-looking green soup. It didn’t smell so great, filling the kitchen with something close to a very mild smoked fish aroma.
After an hour of cooking the nettles start to bed down
A couple of hours after we’d started washing, chopping bashing and boiling, our nettle mix was ready for the next stage. We sterilised our largest fermenter and put 5kg of sugar in the bottom. To this we added a couple of kettles-worth of boiling water and stirred it until it had dissolved.
5kg is a lot of sugar, admittedly, but you have to give your yeast something to live off, and the sugar is what eventually turns into alcohol, so it is crucial to the whole brewing process.
Winemaking requires a lot of sugar
When the sugar was all dissolved we took out as much of the solids as we could from the nettle pan and then strained the remaining liquid through a cheese cloth and sieve into the sugar mixture in the fermenter. It was a pretty ugly colour by now. A bit like tea and not at all like wine.
The nettle mixture is transferred to the fermenter
We gave it a good stir and then topped it up to the 16 litre mark with cold water and left the whole thing alone to cool down to room temperature before adding the yeast.
This is dedicated brewers’ yeast, not the kind you’d use when making bread, which we added at a ratio of 7g for every four litres of wine so, in total, 28 grams.
Brewers' yeast is added at 7g for every 4 litres
That was the last stage for the day, and to be honest we were glad. It was now half ten and we’d set out to find our nettles seven hours earlier. The kitchen was in need of a clean-up and we wanted to sit down.
We left the yeast floating on the top of the wine mixture without stirring, put the lid on the fermenter and fitted an airlock so that it could breathe, then pushed it under the kitchen worktop where it can stand next to a small oil-filled radiator. This is another key part of our brewing kit as you need to keep the yeast warm. Not too hot and not too cold – just warm.
The radiator has three strength settings – 1, 2 and 3 – and a heat scale on each of these than runs from 1 to 7. We chose strength 1 and heat 3, so just about warm, which we know from making several other wines previously is more or less perfect and doesn’t use too much electricity.
Now all we do is wait until the fermentation stops before we dig out our bottles. Keep an eye on the site – we’ll post updates as they happen.
We stand the fermenter close to a low-powered radiator to keep it warm
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great work guys, I think you will be well rewarded. I have just tried my first real bottle after aging it for a week. It smells delightful like a savignon Blanc or maybe even a Pinot/Chardonay mix. I decided to make a lightly fizzing ale style and in hindsight I should have added more sugar but it certainly was pleasant. I am sure it will only get better with bottling age, that said I think the alcohol % is around 10 according to our hydrometer. Good luck with yours.
Hi there,
I am thinking about trying to make some wine myself. However, as a beginner, would you recommend that I use a complete kit so that I can get used to the procedures before moving onto recipes such as this, or should I be okay?
Thanks
Jonathan
I’d recommend starting with a kit, Jonathan. Making your own from scratch is both fun and very rewarding, but finding your feet with a kit is an inexpensive way to get used to the idea of fermentation, judging when things are ready to move on to the next stage and so on, as you’re given guidance every step of the way. Brewing your own from foraged supplies means you also need to judge for yourself through observation, smell and taste when you need to make changes.
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