Burnet Flower Wine

BURNET FLOWER WINE

Burnet is a rose-family plant that most people walk right past without a second glance. Its flower heads carry a faint, cucumber-like freshness that translates into something surprisingly delicate in the glass — a pale, almost ethereal white wine with herbal undertones and bright citrus lift. Think of it as a garden wine in the truest sense: quiet, a little unusual, and genuinely rewarding if you give it time. Cultivated flowers will give you the cleanest flavor, but the real magic here is in the technique — hot water extraction, citrus zest, and a grape concentrate backbone that keeps the whole thing from tasting like perfume.

The beginner trap: Leaving any green stem material in with the flower heads will push bitter, grassy flavors into the wine that no amount of aging will fix — use flower heads only.

Ingredients

• 3 quarts burnet flower heads, destemmed and washed
• 1¾ lbs granulated white sugar
• 1 can (12 oz) Welch’s 100% White Grape Juice frozen concentrate
• 2 lemons, zested and juiced
• 1 orange, zested and juiced
• ¼ tsp grape tannin (or 1 cup strongly brewed plain black tea, cooled)
• 6½ pints water, divided
• 1 tsp yeast nutrient
• 1 packet general-purpose wine yeast

Method

1. Place washed, destemmed flower heads and all citrus zest into your primary fermenter. Store the citrus juice in the fridge for now.
2. Bring half a gallon of water to a boil, pour it over the flowers and zest, and stir well. Cover and let it steep for two days at room temperature.
3. On day two, prepare a yeast starter according to the packet instructions. In a separate pot, bring the remaining water to a boil, dissolve the sugar completely, and set it aside to cool to lukewarm.
4. Strain out and discard the flowers and zest. Combine the flower-infused water with the cooled sugar water in the primary fermenter.
5. Add the grape concentrate, reserved citrus juice, grape tannin, and yeast nutrient. Stir thoroughly.
6. Add the yeast starter, cover the fermenter with a sanitized cloth, and move it to a warm spot to ferment.
7. After 7–10 days, when active bubbling slows down, check the specific gravity. If it reads 1.010 or below, transfer the wine to a glass secondary fermenter and seal it with an airlock.
8. If the wine hasn’t cleared after 30 days, add 1 tsp pectic enzyme, rack into a clean secondary, reattach the airlock, and wait another 30 days.
9. Rack again into a clean vessel, then stir in one crushed and dissolved Campden tablet and ½ tsp potassium sorbate. Wait 10 days, then sweeten to taste.
10. Let the wine rest another 30 days, then rack into bottles and age for at least 6 months before opening.

Why this works

Burnet flowers are delicate — their aromatic compounds are water-soluble but fragile, so a hot-water steep pulls flavor without cooking it away the way a rolling boil would. Two days of contact time gives the water a chance to draw out the full range of aromatics from both the petals and the zest. The frozen white grape concentrate does double duty: it adds fermentable sugar and brings natural grape acids and a light body that flower wines desperately need. Without it, you’d have something thin and one-dimensional. The pectic enzyme step at the end breaks down plant-based pectin that causes persistent haziness — flowers, citrus, and their zests are all high in pectin, so don’t skip it if your wine stays cloudy.

Notes

Grape tannin can be hard to find locally — a half-cup of strong, plain black tea (no flavoring) is a reliable grocery-store swap. If you’re foraging wild burnet, be absolutely certain of your identification before using it; when in doubt, leave it out and use cultivated flowers from a garden center instead.