Drink Your Own Garden (Batsford, 2013) offers more than 140 delicious recipes that make the most of your garden produce. Author Judith Glover encourages readers to experiment with a variety of fresh produce, from plums to melons, to make your own fruit wines, as well as meads and beers. This following Rosehip Wine recipe is excerpted from the chapter “Berry and Bush Wines.”
You can purchase this book from the Mother Earth Living store: Drink Your Own Garden.
Rosehip Wine Recipe
Hips, or heps, are the fruit of the rose and are traditionally gathered after the first frost of November. This is a most beneficial wine to make, as the ripened hips are rich in vitamin C.
• 3 1/4 pounds ripe rosehips
• 3 pounds sugar
• 1 lemon
• 1 Camden tablet (a handy form of sulfur dioxide for disinfecting and sterilizing)
• 1 teaspoon pectin enzyme
• 1 gallon water
• Wine yeast
• Yeast nutrient
1. Put the washed hips into a vessel and crush well with a mallet or similar implement.
2. Cover with 1 gallon of cold water, stir in the crushed Camden tablet and pectin enzyme and leave to steep for 24 hours.
3. Draw off 2 pints of the liquid, heat just to boiling point and dissolve the sugar in it.
4. Return this syrup when cooled to the rosehip pulp, together with the yeast, nutrient and juice of the lemon.
5. Cover the vessel and leave in a warm place to ferment for 5 days, stirring twice daily.
6. Strain the liquid off the pulp, pressing well to extract all the juice, and transfer to a fermenting jar. Fit bung and air-lock and leave to ferment on, racking when the wine is starting to clear.
7. When all fermentation has ended and the wine is quite clear, bottle and store in a cool dark place to mature for at least 6 months, preferably a little longer.
More recipes from Drink Your Own Garden
• Blackberry Wine recipe
• Orange Wine recipe
• Peach Wine recipe
Reprinted with permission from Drink Your Own Garden: A Homebrew Guide Using Your Garden Ingredients by Judith Glover and published by Batsford, 2013. Buy this book from our store: Drink Your Own Garden.
