Rose petal wine recipe from your friendly neighborhood provocative gourmand...

Voodoo Flóra
Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭
edited June 2020 in Wildcrafting & Foraging

Rose petals are ripe for the picking at many homesteads at about this time. If you've never picked rose petals, made or drank rose petal wine you haven't lived. Sorry if that's provocative, but it's how it is.

Step one is to pick some rose petals, one of the most delightful jobs you can have. I like to make wine out of red rose petals. If you pluck petals a bit too late you can run into some earwigs. Don't worry they are gnarly looking but harmless. They've got good taste! Leave some roses for the pollinators. If you go though and pluck like half of your petals at the peak of maturity you will actually encourage more continued, robust growth of the entire rose bush. The smell of freshly picked rose petals as you are carrying them to the kitchen is one of the most ethereal scents and uplifting I've ever experienced. I like to pick the petals in the afternoon after the sun has warmed them.

WARNING ALL ROSE PETALS MUST BE ORGANIC

Gently rinse the petals, and fill a five quart / liter pot like 2/3 full with loosely packed petals. Fill the pot to the top minus about an inch and a half with freshly filtered pure water. Bring water to a gentle boil. Cover the petals and let them sit overnight. The petals will float to the top and go limp and fade to a very light pink, some of them will actually become whitish in color. The marvelous red color all gets subsumed into a delightful red broth and fills your kitchen and surrounding rooms with a sweet warm wholesome fragrance of love.

Use a spoon with perforations to take out the petals and be sure to squeeze out any juice from the petals into the pot. Add to the broth about three and a half or four cups of sugar heating the broth up until all the sugar gets melted. Let the mixture cool until the pot is comfortably warm to the touch. Add one packet of yeast and stir, champagne / sparkling wine yeast works well.

After the mixture has cooled pour it into a fermentation jug. Make sure it is bubbling at the top. Keep in a cool, dark pantry. Shake it up every other day or so--at least a few times a week. After a week and a half or so start taste testing. It is ready to bottle when it's slightly sweeter than you want the wine to be.

Drink, enjoy, share with good people. Remember there can be no bad rose petal wine. Only hangovers for the wicked who will not let themselves rest--resulting in a rose petal wine super production. This side effect is typically harmless. Lots of vitamin C, B and K in those petals. Works to get the blood pumping and heal the heart🌹

Comments

  • judsoncarroll4
    judsoncarroll4 Posts: 5,490 admin

    Rose petal is an all time favorite... the only thing better is to use watermelon juice in place of water... and, if you live where they grow, a bit of passion fruit... or honeysuckle flowers!

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭

    @judsoncarroll4 I have never tried mixing it up like that! I do want to make watermelon wine soon. If you have any tips please let me know. Also I can imagine an amazing honeysuckle liquor. There is a huge honeysuckle bush right outside our bedroom and it is fantastic breathing it in at night. I'm now set on making some, that's a lot of honeysuckle to pick but it is good work. I'll try it out probably this weekend and post results soon.

  • judsoncarroll4
    judsoncarroll4 Posts: 5,490 admin

    Oh, no doubt! Watermelon wine is every bit as good as the old Tom T Hall song said. The main thing is to just use crushed watermelon - no water or sugar. On its own, it is perfect. Honeysuckle, gardenia, magnolia, camellia... all make very aromatic wines... maybe a bit too perfumey on their own, so adding them to more subtle wines works very well.

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭

    @judsoncarroll4 I love the idea not adding any sugar!!! I keep reducing the amount I add to recipes. I typically use very little when baking. Really all the sugar I buy is for fermenting. I'm going to try a honeysuckle liquor with super little sugar and we'll see. The rose petal recipe I use three and a half cups sugar to five liters / quarts basically. Even though many recipes call for more. It proved probably more than enough. I tasted it last night and it is beautiful flavor and strong. I stopped myself after like three or so glasses. Made me feel buzzy and great with the world. Literally I was floating at a different level. Can you imagine how bees feel after drinking nectar all day? No wonder they work so hard. I'm going to be busy as a bee today collecting honeysuckle LOL. No hangover this morning from the rose petals. YAY!

  • Cornelius
    Cornelius Posts: 872 ✭✭✭✭

    Does the variety of rose matter?

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭

    @Cornelius great question. All roses are edible. I love dark red rose petals for making wine. But I could imagine a white or pink rose champagne. I would love purple, yellow, orange, all the rose colors under the rainbow to make wine from. I bet there will be rose petal wine tasting clubs and then contests soon enough. Someone will argue their petals are truly the best. At the end of the day it's win-win as you experiment with and drink from all the rose petals possible.

  • Cornelius
    Cornelius Posts: 872 ✭✭✭✭

    @aprilbbrinkman Thank you. I will have to give this a try.

  • chimboodle04
    chimboodle04 Posts: 286 ✭✭✭

    So I have never done this, but I have many roses to use! Do you find that the scent of the rose is similar to the taste of the wine (if that makes sense!)? Trying to decide which rose I should use as my guinea pig batch :) Thank you for sharing!

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭
    edited July 2020

    @chimboodle04 this is a fantastic question, and at the end of the day the nose truly knows. Keep smelling until you arrive at that flower speaks to you. Truly, there is no replacement for your own experimentation. Also, if you want more of a dinner wine that can pair with strong flavors, I've found a deeper, richer, red rose works best. I even had some of my red rose wine with pasta (red saurce) and roasted red pepper this week, it really paired well. If you want a dessert wine or a sparkling lunch wine, then a pinker rose may do the trick. I've still to experiment properly with white, yellow, orange roses and make a kind of champagne out of it. Traditionally Champagne made out of grapes comes from France of course. But the law says nothing about rose petals!

    Also know that the first time you make rose petal wine, there are bound to be trials and error. But eventually you will find a method that works for you. The best part is that the work pays off no matter what. You simply cannot go wrong working with rose petals, the plant will change you and your heart forever.

    @chimboodle04 and @Cornelius please post about how it turned out, I'd love to see about your creations!!!

  • Cornelius
    Cornelius Posts: 872 ✭✭✭✭

    Would stevia work for the sugar so that less would be needed for the recipe or would that prevent the proper fermentation process since the yeast feeds off of the sugar?

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭

    Hi @Cornelius no stevia would not work for fermentation. For a five gallon / quart pot you can get away with three cups sugar or so. In my own little world, I no longer consume hardly any sugar. I don't buy it except a little for baking and also the fermentation. Of course, in fermentation the sugar gets converted to alcohol. As your friendly neighborhood provocative gourmand, I say drink fine rose petal wine in moderation with your supper and be merry! The wine in moderation has a lot of benefits as a totality including aiding the digestion of food and delivery of vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals. Not to mention sheer pleasure.

  • Megan Venturella
    Megan Venturella Posts: 678 ✭✭✭✭

    I have lots of roses, but probably not enough at one time to make this. Is there a way to preserve them until I have enough?

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭

    @Megan Venturella great question. Roses in my experience when you pluck the petals, even more will grow. When I was first starting out, I did sometimes do a bit of a trick wherein not having enough petals at the height of maturity for a complete brew--I'd brew maybe half the amount in a pot for a gallon jug brew, then remove the petals. What is left is the glorious broth. When more rose petals bloomed, I'd simply add to the broth, include more water, brew that up. The important thing is that you take out the petals once they've been brewed, go limp, and lose their color. The broth itself has amazing staying power. If you want to make sure the broth preserves, you can place it in the refrigerator. But the broth won't go bad even if you leave it in the pot at basically room temperature certainly for a week and probably even longer.

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭

    @Megan Venturella and @Cornelius another great option is to make simple rose water. You can add rose water to just about anything. Cocktails, salad dressing, cake icing, syrups, what have you. It is also a fabulous body spray and skin toner. For the rose water recipe, I brew the rose petals just as if you were making the wine. Then, let the broth cool. Take out the wilted rose petals from the water. Place the cooled broth in a glass jar. Voila! Store in the refrigerator. In my experience, the rose water lasts in the refrigerator for years. The rose water even becomes more robust in smell and flavor over time. Once, I bottled rose water and gave it as a gift for after-shave tonic to my man. I gave this to him several years ago. It was more when I was first starting out and had had some herbal fails as we all do. So I don't blame him for being scared to use it LOL. Well, once I found the bottle the rose water had been unrefrigerated for all that time--at least several years. I opened the bottle just recently and it smelled fantastic end amazing. Hadn't gone bad one bit, in fact the smell was close to heaven. So I used the rose water myself as a body spray and it turned into the best rose water experience I've ever had. Just thinking about it, I want some more right now. But we are in a traveling homestead right now and I have yet to build my forever rose petal garden. So I used all my petals up on making the wine, bc I'm a rose petal wine addict. Nothing says I love you like the gift of rose water.

  • Cornelius
    Cornelius Posts: 872 ✭✭✭✭

    @aprilbbrinkman Thank you so much. I will differently try to make the rose water. Thank you again for the recipe!

  • Voodoo Flóra
    Voodoo Flóra Posts: 258 ✭✭✭

    @Cornelius YAY please let me know how it turns out I'm excited about your journey to the land of the roses!