Spiced Beetroot Wine
Home made wine enthusiast, keen blogger and author of Ben’s Adventures in Wine Making, Ben Hardy makes a vintage spiced beetroot wine.
See also:
Crab Apple WineSpiced Apple and Pear PieBlackberry winePickled Beetroot Recipe
The colour produced by beetroot is remarkable, and that alone is a reason to make this wine. The wine is purple, and not the dark maroon that is a feature of many red wines, but a proper purple. Throw in a few spices, and you have yourself a strange, warming and rather enticing wine. ‘Spiced Beetroot Wine’ actually sounds exciting, and, at its best, it falls into the ‘delicious’ category too.
Spiced Beetroot Wine
INGREDIENTS
1.4kg (3lb) beetroot1.4kg (3lb) sugar4.25 litres (7½ pints) water1 lemon4 cloves50g (2oz) root ginger, thinly sliced½ tsp allspiceA pinch (but only a pinch) of such other spices as you fancy1 sachet (or 1 tsp) yeast1 tsp yeast nutrient
METHOD
1 Wash the beetroot, but do not peel it. Chop it into relatively small chunks and put it into a pan with 3½ litres (6 pints) of tap water.
2 Bring the beetroot to the boil and simmer for half an hour or so. The beetroot must be soft at the end of the boiling process.
3 Put the sugar, remaining tap water, juice of the lemon, and the spices in your sealable bucket and pour over the boiling beetroot water, sieving out the beetroot chunks.
4 Throw out the beetroot. (Actually, this stage always strikes me as a waste. Whilst much of the beetroot flavour will have been taken up in the water, there is probably still some good eating in the beetroot chunks. You may want to plan a meal that involves overboiled pieces of beetroot whilst making this wine.)
5 Stir everything up until the sugar has dissolved.
6 After 24 hours, add the yeast and nutrient.
7 Stir once or twice a day for five (or so) days, then put the liquid into a demijohn, sieving out the ginger and cloves.
8 Between 6 weeks and 3 months later, rack the liquid into a new demijohn, making up any space with a solution made from sugar and water at a ratio of 150g (6oz) of sugar to every ½ litre (1 pint) of water. You will probably need only half this quantity, as beetroot wine has little sediment.
9 Bottle 6 or more months after beginning the wine.
There are a few points to note about spiced beetroot wine. Firstly, and most importantly, is that you must store it in darkened demijohns. If you have no brown glass demijohns, then wrap paper or silver foil round your clear glass ones. The colour is unstable, and after me waxing lyrical on the magenta hues, you don’t want to find yourself with an unimpressive-looking brown wine. Secondly, I have in the past had a troubled relationship with adding spices to wine. The year I tried ‘clove and ginger’ wine there was virtually no fermentation, despite me trying to restart the process with a second application of wine yeast, bought specifically for ‘stuck ferments’. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but I suspect that too much spice will impede fermentation. Therefore, do not be tempted to think “four cloves and two ounces of ginger – that’s nothing”, and put in lots more. I still have my demijohn of clove and ginger liquid (I can’t refer to it as wine!), but it is becoming increasingly dusty, and one of these years I will actually throw it out. Don’t let the same thing happen to your spiced beetroot wine.
A third thing worth mentioning is that this wine definitely improves with age. The first time I made it I thought the first couple of bottles were okay, and then left the remainder for another year. This transformed the wine into something strange, dark, and delicious – someone compared it to Christmas in a bottle. It is a self-mulled wine, and the longer you can avoid temptation, the better. There is nothing wrong with drinking it young, but when old it becomes something special.
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