Drinking your garden: turning fruits, vegetables into wine

When you think of what goes into making an alcoholic beverage, you probably think of barley or grapes.

But why go to the liquor store for a bottle of wine when you can make it with ingredients grown from your own backyard?

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"Anything you grow too much of and you don't want to freeze it or eat it some way, you can probably make a wine from it," Cedric Gillott told CBC's Saskatoon Morning host Leisha Grebinski. Gillott teaches a workshop called Drinking Your Garden as part of the University of Saskatchewan's Hort Week.

He said fruits and vegetables such as carrots, parsnips, choke cherries, gooseberries and raspberries can all be used to make alcoholic beverages.

"The difficulty with flowers, of course, is picking enough of them," he said, adding plants such as clovers and dandelions would make for tasty ingredients.

"You would need something like four or five cups of just the yellow part of the dandelion flower to make even a gallon of wine."

Turning vegetables into wine

Gillott said it's a lengthy but simple process to turn vegetables into wine.

"You parboil or fully cook them to start with to extract the juice and flavours. Cool it down and, basically, then you add the other necessary ingredients and away you go," he said.

The other ingredients needed include sugar and yeast.

"For a gallon of wine, you'd probably need about two pounds of sugar for each of the gallon. And then you add some other little things to make the wine more palatable and allow the yeast to do its work."  

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