From The Forest

The first time I picked up a book on wine making at home, I quickly became discouraged. As I scanned the pages, I noted such wine ingredients as Campden tablets, various types of wine yeasts, yeast nutrient tablets, malic acid, grape tannin, and peptic enzyme. As though this hadn't confused me enough, I scanned a little further and found such terms as hydrometer, must, racking, yeast starter, gravity and bung.

These ingredients and terms, which later became known to me, left me totally baffled at the time. I quickly decided that making wine was not a good project to begin on a quite Sunday afternoon. I ended up using my freshly picked berries in pies.

Some time later I came across a recipe, published in an outdated copy of Farmer's Almanac, for Dandelion Wine. The recipe contained no foreign sounding ingredients and the instructions were easy to follow. For a novice winemaker, such a recipe proved inspirational. Winemaking, using wild fruits and flowers, later became one of my casual pastimes.

Since winemaking is not a full-fledged hobby of mine, I have not become a connoisseur of fine homemade wine, nor an amateur scientist with a well equipped laboratory. My wines are flavorful and palatable, even though they begin their existence in a cracked crock I purchased at a garage sale.

The methods I employ in winemaking are very basic and unsophisticated. And a book such as this, Wild Wines, was exactly what I was seeking when I first began my winemaking adventures.

More from Darcy Williamson: Basque Cooking and Love; River Tales of Idaho; The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook; Ten-Minute Meals, Five-Minute Workouts: For People Who Never Have Enough Time; How to Prepare Common Wild Foods; Salmon River Legends and Campfire Cuisine; Cooking With Spirit: North American Indian Food and Fact & many more!