Why make herb and flower wines?
Essentially, a home wine maker can divide his year into seasons based on what’s available when. Most of the fruit wines you’ll make (raspberry, blackberry, elderberry, black currant, etc.) are work for mid to late Summer. They’ll yield fabulous wines, full bodied, with a great variety of flavour, and they’ll form the backbone of your wine cellar; the table wines, the cooking wines, the wines that emulate those you buy. Then in Winter you’ll be making vegetable wines and maybe ‘kit’ wines; these are the ones that often need longer to mature but which have a surprising depth of flavour. That leaves Spring and early Summer, when there aren’t many ripe fruits around, not till the strawberries, gooseberries and apricots, and this is a time when many of the flowers and herbs in gardens and in the woods are at their very best. Not to exploit them seems almost wrong. The flavours you can produce from herbs and flowers are quite tremendously variable, as you’d expect, so the range of uses to wh
