BREW: Yennefer’s Lilac Witcher Wine

• Yennefer’s Lilac Wine Ingredients
• Brewing Equipment Needed
• How to Make Lilac Wine
• Bottling your Lilac Wine
• How to Store and Age Lilac Wine
• Yennefer’s Lilac Witcher Wine

This homemade lilac wine recipe is inspired by the Witcher series… and whether you’re a fan of the novels, the games, or the Netflix adaptation (or maybe just a casual appreciator of Henry Cavill’s gruff and buff portrayal of Geralt), you can brew a bit of magic in your own kitchen. No cauldron required (just a regular stainless or enamel pot, and some other odds and ends that I’ll get into below). 

When you concoct this potent potion, for a moment, you could be a budding (yes that’s a flower pun, deal with it) adept studying and stirring away at the Aretuza academy. But you don’t have to be an actual witch (or even an avid gamer or fantasy fan) to make this delicate floral and berry wine (although it certainly can’t hurt)! Homebrewing is a little bit art, and a little bit science, but I’ll walk you through it. 

This enchantingly blush crimson floral wine conjures an evocative spell of a crisp spring day, the warmth of the sun with the threat of cold winds that still might blow. It’s sweet and tart in balance, and like Yennefer, shouldn’t be underestimated! 

If you can get them, try making this lilac wine with gooseberries, and you’ll perfectly recreate Yennefer’s distinctive perfume. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any… they’re not in season yet and I couldn’t find any frozen ones. I am definitely going to try to stash some this summer (or make a gooseberry wine and blend it) for my batch next spring though, and will update you when I do!

Yennefer’s Lilac Wine Ingredients

Sugar:

Plain granulated sugar is best for your lilac wine. You could also use a light turbinado sugar, I suppose, but I like to let the clean floral flavor shine through. The lilacs themselves have almost no sugars, unlike grape or fruit wines, so you need to add sugar for the yeast to have anything to ferment at all.

You could also use honey to make a floral mead, but I recommend trying this first with sugar to make sure you like it and have a good handle on the process before using the much more expensive ingredient. Lilac mead is also delicious, but the flavors are influenced by the type of honey you use as well.

Lilac Flowers:

Pick your lilac flowers when the majority of the buds have opened and are fully fragrant but before they begin to brown around the edges of the petals. The best time to gather them is in the early morning. Make sure that you are not foraging petals that have been sprayed, and don’t gather near busy roadways or dusty dirt roads.

You want to use just the flower petals for this recipe, not the stems. Make sure you don’t include any leaves, as the green parts of lilac bushes are toxic. Strip the petals off of the stems and into a bowl or nylon mesh brewing bag. Check over them carefully for twigs or bugs. You don’t want to wash them, as you may lose some of their delicate fragrance.

Currants, Raisins, or Grape Concentrate:

You could use currants, golden, or regular raisins. I like golden ones to keep the color bright, or currants which have a more delicate flavor than raisins. You can also use frozen white grape juice concentrate, or substitute freshly pressed white grape juice for some of the water. Make sure whatever you use doesn’t have added sorbates (preservatives that will keep your wine from fermenting).

Traditionally these were added as a source of yeast nutrients, though they don’t actually do much in that regard, and I use modern yeast nutrients in my hedgerow or country wines.

However, these do contribute to the body and mouthfeel of the wine, as well as some flavor and fermentable sugars, so I still like to add them. If you use raisins, chop them roughly (at least in half) so that you get more of their goodness into your wine.

Berries:

I like to add some frozen berries to add color, flavor, acidity, and body to the wine. I used some blackberries from our bushes last summer that I still had in the freezer. You could also use blueberries. Or, if you can get them, use gooseberries, with couple darker berries thrown in for color. If you use fresh berries, freeze them first so you get a better flavor and color extraction (the ice crystals help break down the cell walls in the fruit, leading to more flavor in your wine).

Acid Blend:

This is a blend of winemaking acids, usually tartaric acid, citric acid, and malic acids, originally extracted from fruit, but now usually made through fermentation. It’s used to balance the acidity in wines, both for flavor and to help create a happy pH for the yeast to work in. This half pound bag isn’t a lifetime supply but will last you for years unless you’re brewing everyday. You can also buy smaller quantities if you don’t brew often or have limited storage space.

You could substitute food-grade citric acid if you don’t have acid blend, but it’s inexpensive and lasts basically forever if you keep it dry. If you don’t have or don’t want to use acid blend or citric acid, substitute one tablespoon of freshly squeezed or good quality bottled lemon juice for each teaspoon of acid blend. This recipe uses one tablespoon of acid blend, so you would use about 6 tablespoons of lemon juice.

Yeast Nutrient:

There are several different formulations of this available, the simplest and cheapest of which is either straight DAP (diammonium phosphate crystals) or DAP and urea. I’ll use this in beer, but for my wines and meads I prefer to use either Fermax or Wyyeast Wine Yeast “Vintner’s Choice” yeast nutrient, which are formulated for wine yeast and has additional ingredients to support the health of the yeast in the more difficult fermentation environments of higher gravity wines and meads.

Untoasted Oak Chips or Wine Tannin:

Tannins are the astringent compounds that give balance, mouthfeel and help with the aging potential of wines. You can buy powdered tannin for winemaking, or use a small amount of untoasted oak chips or cubes. Older recipes used black tea for this, which is also something you could try if you don’t have tannin or untoasted oak chips.

This is a delicate wine, so you don’t want to use much so that you don’t overpower the light floral character, but a bit of tannin adds backbone and keeps your wine from being too cloying or insipid. Be sparing – too much oak is worse than none at all, and while an overoaked wine can sometimes be saved with extended aging, you will lose a lot of the character of your lilac wine. Less is more!

Campden Tablet:

A crushed campden tablet, added to the wine mixture after heating and well before adding the yeast, gives a measured dose of sulphites that will kill off any contaminants like wild yeasts and bacteria that made it through your quick boiling water sanitation of the fruit.

This ensures a better chance of getting a lovely wine at the end and not a funky fruit vinegar or wild brew. Wild fermentations can be fun things to play with, but can also be total failures. Start playing around with them after your cellar is full of bright, clean tasting homebrews, and after you’re an expert in telling mold from a pellicle and good healthy fermentations from funky ones that will give you a headache at best, yeah?

The campden tablets you want are KMS, or potassium metabisulfate, not the SMS, or sodium metabisulfate tablets. SMS powder and tablets, which are usually cheaper and also stronger, are fine for sanitizing equipment but can give an off-flavor to your finished wines. Since it delivers a more potent dose of sulphite, some people are more sensitive to this. Use SMS for cleaning and KMS for adding directly to your actual wine must. Store these in a sealed glass or plastic jar away from moisture, or they’ll lose potency.

Wine or Champagne yeast:

Dry wine yeast or a “smack-pack” pouch of liquid yeast. There are lots of different strains of yeast available for fermenting different styles of wine or accenting various flavors. This is a pale and subtly flavored blush wine, so choose a yeast accordingly. I recommend  Lalvin 71B 1122, Red Star Premier Cuvee or Cotes de Blanc, or Vintner’s Harvest CY17. Champagne yeast (EC-1118, Pasteur Blanc) is best saved for stuck fermentations and very high alcohol meads, but it will also work if you want a very dry lilac wine or your fermentation stalls. Store your wine yeast in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

Brewing Equipment Needed

Fermentation Vessel:

For the primary fermentation with the flowers and currants, you’ll need a wide mouth glass or food-grade plastic vessel of one and a half to two gallons for a full batch. This will allow enough room for the fruit and a vigorous primary fermentation without overflowing and making a big mess.

My favorite primary container for most small batch wines like this is the Little Big Mouth Bubbler from Northern Brewer. It has thick, heavy glass and plenty of space for a one gallon batch of wine or mead. You can also use a wide-mouth glass jar, a small two or three gallon food-grade plastic bucket, or other fermentation container, with an airlock in the lid.

Because the flowers are more bulky than some other wine ingredients, I used a three gallon food grade bucket for the first week, then racked off into a smaller glass container to minimize surface area and oxidation.

Gallon Jug, Stopper, and Airlock:

After the primary fermentation has completed (usually 7-14 days), siphon and rack the lilac wine off the mesh brewing bag of flowers, fruit, and yeast sediment. Transfer your fermenting wine into a narrow-mouthed one gallon jug or demijohn fitted with an airlock and a stopper, or split the batch into two half-gallon glass growlers. Age the lilac wine for up to a year before bottling, but at least 30 days, and ideally two months or until it is sparkling clear. You’ll want to have at least a few of these glass jugs if you’re doing any amount of small-batch wine, mead, or cider making (or even micro batches of beer).

You can save these from gallon jugs of apple juice, if you can find them, or cooking wine (the cheap stuff, like Carlo Rossi, that are still sold in glass jugs). Maybe make a big batch of Glühwein for your next holiday party, or a very fruity sangria if you’re reading this in the summer. Or, skip the rotgut and just buy new glass jugs, with rubber or silicone stoppers, and airlocks.

Nylon Mesh Brew Bag:

A heat-resistant nylon brewing bag isn’t essential, but it’s really nice to have. It can safely stand up to the boiling sugar water mixture without melting or leaching nasty stuff into your wine. It contains the lilac flowers, currants or raisins, optional berries, and a lot of the sediment during primary fermentation so they are easy to remove, without any coarse chunks that might clog or get stuck in your siphon hose during racking.

You don’t need an extra-large brew-kettle sized bag like you’d use for BIAB beer making. A smaller bag that is just big enough to hold the fruit is better, and easier to keep submerged. You can use a glass fermentation weight in the bag to keep it submerged if you have one, or just push the bag under the must with a sanitized spoon for the first few days.

Hydrometer and Test Jar:

A hydrometer isn’t necessary to make this wine, but it’s invaluable for tracking the progress of your fermentation and ensuring your wine is fully done and ready to safely bottle. It will also let you calculate the alcohol content of your wine.

How to Make Lilac Wine

step one:

• Pick your lilac flowers when the flower clusters are mostly open but not browning. It’s best to cut them early in the morning, when they are most fragrant.
• Pick over them carefully, and pluck just the flowers from the green clusters (the stems are toxic and bitter), discarding any twigs or insects.
• Sanitize your wide-mouth fermentation jar or small bucket and airlocks, using your preferred homebrewing sanitizer (I like Star-san).
• The Camden tablet that you add later will also help sanitize everything but it’s best to keep everything as clean as possible.

step two:

• Combine the flower petals with the currants or chopped raisins, oak chips or powdered tannin, and the berries, if you are using them, in a heat-resistant nylon fine mesh brewing bag. This is optional but makes everything a lot nicer to work with.
• Tie off the bag so it stays closed. I bagged the currants separately, but if you have room, you can add it all to one brew bag.
  
  

step three:

• Heat a gallon of water to a boil in a stockpot, and dissolve the sugar into it, bringing it back up to a boil for no more than a minute.
• Turn off the heat, and add the nylon brew bag(s) with the lilac flowers and other ingredients. Dunk the bag until it sinks, and cover the pot to let it steep.
• Let the flower and fruit must mixture steep until the pot is cool to the touch.
• Add the acid blend and yeast nutrient, and stir with a sanitized spoon.

step four:

• With clean hands or tongs, carefully transfer the nylon bag of flowers and berries into the sanitized fermentation vessel
• Pour the cooled must (sugar + water + infused floral & berry juice) carefully over the bag into the wide-mouth container.
• Crush the campden tablet (or use an equivalent amount of K-meta powder) into the mixture and stir it in with a sanitized metal or plastic spoon.
• Wait 12-24 hours for the sulphites to do their work and dissipate.

step five:

• Check the initial specific gravity of the must if you have a hydrometer, and write that down in your brewing notebook or on a piece of painter’s tape on your fermenting vessel.
• Add the packet of wine yeast, and place it somewhere warm and protected from light (check the preferred temperature range for the yeast you are using).

step six:

• Let ferment for 7-10 days in primary, pushing the mesh flower bag down with a clean spoon regularly so the exposed part of the bag doesn’t mold.
• Once the initial vigorous fermentation has settled, you can transfer the wine off of the flowers and into the secondary vessel.

Secondary Fermentation

• Carefully remove the nylon brew bag from the fermenter, letting it drain completely into the container (without squeezing, which can make your wine cloudy).
• Siphon and rack the wine from the primary into your sanitized secondary container (usually a narrow-mouthed glass jug or small carboy). Use a piece of sanitized tubing and racking cane, or carefully transfer it with a sanitized filter funnel.
• Check the specific gravity and record this again.
• Top with an airlock and stopper, and put in a cool, dark place to age and finish fermenting.
• If a lot of sediment forms in the jug, after a few weeks you can carefully rack it off the sediment and into another sanitized jug (or carefully pour it, leaving the fine sediment behind).

Bottling your Lilac Wine

• When the wine is completely clear, and completely finished with fermentation, you can bottle it. When the specific gravity is no longer dropping with measurements taken 7-14 days apart, it should be safe to bottle.
• If you want to make sure that it doesn’t restart fermentation (which, in a sweet wine like this, can pop corks, or worse, break the bottle), you can add a small amount of potassium sorbate at bottling.
• Bottle in cleaned and sanitized wine bottles with new corks, or swing-top (Grolsch-type) bottles. You can also use sanitized crown cap bottles and new bottle caps.

How to Store and Age Lilac Wine

While your lilac wine is safe to drink as soon as it is done fermenting (or even before, as long as you don’t bottle it), it will taste best if you give it some time in the bottle to age.

Many fruit and flower wines can’t stand up to extended aging, but a few months of bulk fermenting before bottling will make sure you get a clear and sparkling wine. It’s also best to let your wine rest for at least a month after bottling, if you can wait that long!

Like most wines, your homemade lilac wine will age most gracefully between 55-70 F (ideally in the mid-range of that). Your wine will age faster at warmer temperatures and more slowly at cooler temperatures.

If your bottles have metal caps, avoid very high humidity, which can cause the caps to rust. If you corked your wine with natural corks, keep an eye on the humidity level in your storage space- too dry, and the corks can dry out and become brittle, but an excess of damp can encourage mold.