Phil Tonks: Hi, I'm Phil Tonks, owner and wine maker at the Grandview Winery in East Calais, Vermont. We're going to talk about putting together Dandelion wine. The first thing that I am going to do is go over the equipment that you need to do this. Now as we looked before, were going to need some flowers and weve already picked a bunch of petals. This is only a portion of what needs to be picked. First piece of equipment is a nice bucket, probably a five gallon, seven gallon bucket, usually pretty easy to come by. Were going to blend that with sugar and we can use basic old cane sugar, right from the grocery store. were going to need lemons, were going to need some oranges and you can substitute lemon juice for the lemons or for that matter you can use orange juice.

These are all ingredients that go together to put together the wine. Once weve put together the wine, we are going to add yeast to it. This happens to be a wine yeast. You could use, if you wanted to a baking yeast. Generally, your results are much better, if you use a wine yeast. This one is Montrachet, which is a good general purpose wine yeast. You could also use something like a champagne yeast. This and the other thing is a Campden tablet. These look kind of like an aspirin. Heres one right there. You could see them down here. These help to sanitize it and keep other things from ruining the wine. Those are also available from a wine shop.

A couple little tools. A nice thermometer is useful. Were going to need that for when we put the yeast together. Measuring cup is helpful. Two cups of sugar equals one pound of sugar, that's an easy way to measure it. This is all portion of getting it started. Well put the ingredients together. Well then add the yeast, well get it to ferment, once it's been fermenting, well transfer it into a glass container, this is what called a five gallon carboy. Obviously, if you doing one gallon, you want to one gallon jug and those are actually easier to come by than you might think, a nice empty one gallon wine jug works pretty well.

On the top, I have an airlock. Now this is designed so that as the carbon dioxide comes out of the process, it passes up through here and bubbles out, because it sealed it, it keeps air from coming back into it.

Next, and this is a little more fancy than you might use if we were doing by hand, but this is a nice corker for when you are ready to cork. Here is a piece of 5/16 tubing that we will use as a siphon to get it from the jug into the wine bottle. Obviously, you need some wine bottles. This happens to be 375 milliliter wine bottle. You can either buy the bottles at a wine or bear supply store where you can buy most of the rest of this stuff or you can actually accumulate them. I found sometimes visiting a nearby restaurant and asking the set bottles aside for you is an easy way to get a few bottles for a not a whole lot of money.

Once youre all done with that, next comes the cork. You can buy corks again at a wine supply store. That will go in here to do corking of the bottle. I like to use, these little capsules, all through available from the wine supply store and they go on the top, they shrink and make a nice finish to the bottle and hopefully by the time we are all done, we end up with a nice bottle of Dandelion wine.