You will find that Potter Settlement Winery is the ONLY winery on this continent, quite literally in North America that sells a dandelion wine commercially. Our dandelion wine…we’re not making it again. No, we’ll never make this wine ever again. It was too much work. This was way too hard.
I hate the winter. My favourite month of the year is May. I love May. I lost six Mays of my life, picking flowers for you guys in the bugs and the black flies and it was misery.
I’ve had dandelion wine before. I’ve been through Toronto this spring. You see the little Italian kids picking up the dandelions where grandpa was making the stuff in the basement. I never liked dandelion wine. I always thought it had an arugula salad sort of fetid flavour and I had some that were worse than others.
What made me make this was a recipe that I actually made and put on the label. Here’s the old recipe. You can see it in the photo of the label which we put on the bottle. This recipe is from the year 1560 and I found that recipe in an antique’s market in London England – a place called Kensington Market back in 2007. I thought, this is cool. And I could read it. But I couldn’t understand it. So I kept it. I sent it to my Alma Mater – my old university – to the English department and a professor of Old English was kind enough to translate it for me.
And the big takeaway I could say from that recipe, was “neinen grenen”, which is old English for “nothing green”. So I thought, “Ah, that’s where everybody is screwing up! Because the flowers when you pick them, you are going to get the green part of the bottom of the ball that holds the yellow fluff and you have to get rid of that. And I think what people are doing is just picking them and using the whole show, and that’s why they get that weird arugula flavour.
And what you have to do ….here’s the worst part, you have to pick them, and then you have to put them on a table and you have to get your team to sit there with scissors and cut all the yellow fluff and then you vacuum seal them up.
It took me SIX years of picking these flowers to fill a chest freezer and that’s what you’re looking at. This is thousands. I’m not joking. Thousands of flowers to make this little bit in this bottle.
It has a beautiful flavour. I was surprised. It’s kind of like a white grapefruit kind of flavour. And then you’re going to get a different flavour. And it kind of stays there to the end of the finish. And that flavour, I couldn’t figure out what it was. My wife, Erin, a Sommelier and that’s her job, asked, “What was I tasting here? I’ve tasted this flavour before, but I don’t know what it is.”
I’m like, okay, we got a problem here because I have to put the description on the bottle. So we got a wine critic through here and he said, “I know that flavour is. It’s saffron.”
Saffron! That makes perfect sense! Think about it. I’m cutting the pistols off the yellow fluff off and isolating it to make your wine. And that flavour is what’s on the pistils and stamens of the Crocus flower, and saffron, if you’t know what saffron is, it’s the world’s most expensive spice at 1000 bucks an ounce – and they’re very similar in flavour.
I’ve never had a wine in my life that tasted like saffron. So this is beautiful stuff!
My fear is that because it’s so delicate …it’s made from flowers, it’s not going to have a long shelf life for you, so I kind of covered my bases by blending a little bit of a neutral white wine in here called Vidal to give us some shelf life for you. So if you have a bottle, my recommendation to you all is to drink it within a year or a year and-a-half. Don’t sit on this. This wine is meant to be enjoyed. Not aged. It’s a limited time period to enjoy it. Just like the window for that flower is the month of May and then it’ gone? Same thing. You have a limited amount of time to enjoy this.
The price of this wine is better than you might think. The other winery that was selling it in the States, was selling it for a $25 USD a bottle, which is what, $30 CDN, for a 275 mL bottle. I sell it for $60 CDN – for three times as of much wine in a 750 ml bottle. This is a value. It’s delicate and delicious. About 11 % alcohol and just bursting with citrus and a saffron notes.
But here’s the best part about this wine. You guys are gonna go to a barbecue or a friend’s house and you bring THIS bottle of wine. You walk in with that and you’ll discover that suddenly you’re the most popular person at the party because everybody wants to try it! You can’t find this commercially anywhere else. I’m the only one.
That’s it. I’m the only one that sells a dandelion wine commercially on this entire continent of North America. And I’m not doing it again.
I’m not. It was too much work for it. And that’s why it’s something that’s not widely commercially available.
I was hated the last couple years. My team asked me, “We’re not picking damned andelions again, are we?”
I’d say “Yes, we are. Come on, let’s go.” They loathed me. An hour of picking and you’re fine. Then your lower back will tell you otherwise. That’s why no one wants to do it. It’s simply just too hard and labor-intensive.
It’s also not profitable. $60 a bottle. That’s not profitable? No, it’s not. To break even with my labor costs we calculated that the bottle should be over $100/bottle to break even, But no one would ever pay that for a flower wine – so it’s the only wine in my inventory that I am actually losing money on at that price. But it’s delicate and it’s only good for a short amount of time and I don’t want to sit on it – so it has to go. That’s why $60/bottle.
This wine goes great with pretty much anything you’d expect a fine citrusy white to be paired with. Cheeses. Poultry. Fish. It’s excellent.
Our Dandelion Wine can be purchased on line along with our other fine wines. Minimum order is 6 mixed bottles.
Dandelion wine needs to age 18 months for the proper taste, if not you are wasting it. An 5 to 1 on the pods.