Recipe; Orange & Hawthorn Blossom

If you make a wine that you're not happy with then don't chuck it out. You may just need to give it time, sometimes years. Alternatively you may find it's great for making blends with. This is what I ended up doing with my Hawthorn Blossom Wine. It tasted of nothing, but was dry and strong (15%). I didn't want to chuck it cos it didn't taste bad. So I rummaged about my wines and reckoned that it would blend well with a sweet, strong, full flavoured wine. Orange (aka citrus wine) was the obvious choice.

The first thing to do is mix a bit of each wine together and taste it. Jeez wine making is such a chore sometimes! Starting around 50/50 is as good a choice as any. For me when I did a 50/50 blend I was instantly happy with the result. The sweet strong orange wine seemed to lose nothing at all. While the Hawthorn Blossom was completely absorbed. The result as I saw it was that I now got to make my Orange wine go twice as far! So that was enough for me, I got the measuring jug and funnel out and got blending. So here is a gratuitous piccie, Hawthorn on the left, Orange on the right.

And tonight I made another 6 bottles of this blend, and I'm drinking some, and it's great!

If I lived in a country that permitted distillation of alcohol then I probably would have distilled the Hawthorn Blossom Wine. However that is illegal here, so it wasn't an option. An option that has just occurred to me as I write this is to make Jelly with it. Alcoholic jelly is great adult fun, and those strong jelly flavours would work well with the high alcohol content. I still have a gallon of Hawthorn Blossom wine left and 1/2 gallon of Orange wine. I reckon that some of the Hawthorn blossom will end up being Jelly now, and hey maybe some in a trifle too.