Improved Mint Wine Recipe

So here is the recipe for the Mint Wine that I bottled the other night. If you follow this exactly then you'll end up with a very delicately flavoured mint wine. So do look out for my thoughts at the end of the post if you want more mint flavour.

Recipe for 2 Gallons

155 grams of Mint Leaves
(70% Garden Mint, 20 % Apple Mint, 10 % Moroccan Mint)
2.2 Kg Sugar
325 G chopped Raisins
Juice of 1 Lemon
Juice of 1 Lime
1 Teaspoon Tartaric Acid
1 Teaspoon Citric Acid
1 Campden Tablet
Yeast Nutrient
Sauternes Yeast

Method

You only want the mint leaves, not stems. So strip them off and then extract the flavour by steeping in hot boiled water 4 times, each time for 15-30 minutes, each time decanting off the liquor into your fermenting vessel. Keep a lid on the vessel you do the extracting in. You may get more flavour by bruising or crushing the mint leaves before steeping. I didn't do this, but will do so next time.

Here's a piccie of the amount of mint you'll need to look like 150 grams (ish). This is the sprigs, not just the leaves. Those bowls are each big enough for the trifle you would have on your Xmas table.

Add all the other ingredients to the steeped liquor in the FV except the yeast. I put my raisins in a muslin bag to make removal easy. Make up to 2 gallons, make sure sugar is dissolved. Cover and leave for 24 hours.

Next day give the must a really give stir and get as much air dissolved as possible. Then add your yeast. This is important because yeast needs dissolved oxygen to multiply. You should stir in this fashion for the next few days. After about a week remove the raisins and move the wine to secondary fermenters with airlocks. From then on follow the usual procedure of racking, degassing, stabilising etc. I needed finings (chitin based) to clear the wine of a haze.

Further Thoughts

When I made the trial brew for this last year I added a sprig of mint to each wine bottle. It looked wonderful and certainly gave much more mint flavour. I haven't done this for the first batch that I bottled this year. But when it comes to bottling the second gallon I think I will. It certainly adds more mint flavour. Alternatively you may go with a gentle but slower procedure for extracting the mint flavour.  Bruise the leaves, bag them up and add them to the primary fermenting vessel without doing any hot water extraction first. Or if you have a wide necked secondary fermenter then you could try a late addition of bruised leaves. Or you could try making a tincture of mint by extracting in a spirit. Perhaps Vodka for a neutral taste, tho if I went this route I think I would use a small amount of cheap cooking brandy as there are raisins in the recipe anyway.

certainly bottling with a sprig of mint works, tho it does give also give the wine a slight green taste, like of nettles.