Passages from Ray Bradburys Dandelion Wine flow into my mind or heart often. All déjà-vu-y images and washes of feelings. Like a dream. Have you read it?
"Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."
There was a summer not long ago, yet many years ago, that my whole extended family picked buckets of dandelions - so I could make this wine. It was a happy day - we had been a bit estranged, but together for one of those deliberately unconfronting we-have- to-do-it post Xmas, Xmas picnics.
I was testing my recipe for Dandelion Wine for Wild Drinks that summer but I knew of it only because of the book by Ray Bradbury - Dandelion Wine. This is the first book I ever read that had so many beautiful passages in it; there are images or feelings that I formed from it and still float into me. LIttle moments. Maybe it was the first time I'd been moved by words. I think I was 14 because we read Dandelion Wine as a class text at school - (8 th grade, ISKL/International School of Kuala Lumpur). That same year in science class we made Pineapple Wine, which I took home to my parents so proudly and appears in my book as well. Big year on reflection!
After our lunch and because there was a field of dandelions, the girls and I started picking them and everybody joined in. I think people love a project in situations like these. Some of us picked flowers and others sat and plucked the heads off, chatting. We mostly ended up around the buckets together. The work was a relaxant, a balm for the most hurt, or anxious of us. Sitting or picking side by side made for slower, easier chatting. Sadly I think it was the last time we were all together like that. I am hesitant to drink that last dusty bottle of the petals we picked.
A garden is not too dissimilar to wild fermentation. Both practices bend you over, pull you away from the noise of the world and into something older, quieter, more essential. Both give you time to think things through, alone.
Gardening, Bradbury said, is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. When you're off on your own like that, away from everyone, there's a quiet pride in it — you get to sit with your own thoughts for once, nobody watching, nobody needing anything from you. Plato in the peonies and thinking things through, alone, where nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows.
Could this also refer to the wild bacterial garden sitting on your kitchen bench? Connecting with the invisible forces. Leaning in - crouching down, bending over. Remembering you have a nose.
I encourage common sense and reliance upon your own senses in my books and workshops. You have to! You lean into intuition, hope and something otherwordly when you work within nature - not controlling it but setting up an environment for it to do the work.
When you're leaning over your ferments - checking the latest brew, or skimming annoying kahm yeast from sauerkraut, tasting, folding koji rice, straining milk kefir - you are not making your next meal but stepping into a different rhythm. Time moves differently when your hands are in brine, when you're noticing temperatures, when you're waiting for bubbles to tell you the yeasts have woken up.
Nobody guesses, accuses, knows - but there you are. Philosopher in the pickle crock.
And this is ancient womens work..
Stephen Buhner wrote about this too, though from a different angle. He traced how fermentation was the women's domain throughout history. We were the brewers, the keepers of beer and fermented drinks, the holders of knowledge passed mother to daughter or friend, for thousands of years. Essential work back then.
Until it became taxable. Then suddenly it was legislated, controlled, professionalised - and no longer ours for the keeping.
What moves me most in Buhner's writing is that he said when you touch the ground and pull from it to ferment, you are connecting to your ancestors. You are doing something they did. You are touching the same ancient, eternal bacteria that existed long before us and will exist long after.
When you catch wild yeasts from the air around you for a wild brew be it a soda, mead, wine or beer, or you nuruture your milk kefir grains, or feed your SCOBY sweet tea; when you pick dandelions or rose petals or rhubarb you come across and turn them into wine - you're reaching back through centuries, hand over hand with every man or woman who ever fermented before you.
The bacteria on your hands, in your kitchen, in the air around us all - they're the same ones our grandmother's grandmother's grandmother worked with. They're older than nations. Older than agriculture. Maybe older than language itself.
Your body remembers too.
The physical act of fermentation can transform not just what you are fermenting but your body and senses. The bending over. The repetitive work. The way your back aches a little after an afternoon of... picking dandelions for example. The way your hands are stained yellow with pollen and sticky with sugar syrup. Or red from kimchi, or purple from beetroots. Or stained brown from green walnuts. They way it feels to squeeze liquid from a handful of salted cabbage after massaging it.
Fermentation brings you back into your body, into your senses. You have to smell the ferment to know if it's right. Taste it. Listen for the bubbles. Feel the texture under your fingers. Watch for the colour changes that tell you when to move a jar from counter to fridge. Use your senses.
You can't ferment abstractly or while scrolling your phone or thinking about your to-do list. This work wants a kind of dreamy presence. And in that presence, you get to thinking things through. Alone with your thoughts, your hands, and billions of invisible allies doing their ancient work.
I have always recommended checking your ferments and dabbling around at the end of the day - or before anyone else is up: house tidied a bit, dishwasher on - house darker. Kitchen benches and sink clean. Dabble. Open lids. Sip something. Return to yourself for a second. Working like this turns you away from the world for a little while and makes you proud, connects you and gets you thinking as Bradbury wrote.
And - what grows in the wild is stronger...
Dandelions grow in cracks, thriving in neglected corners, persisting despite our best efforts to eradicate them. The reason we wild ferment is to get the same resilient power that you see when a weed is breaking through concrete. Things that grow wild are stronger. They're free, and everywhere.
Also you might be making wine.
Dandelion wine is old magic. Sunshine captured in a bottle. The taste of summer lawn and childhood and time slowing down. It's not complicated - just flowers, sugar, citrus, water, and wild yeasts. But the act of making it can be transformative.
You have to get down on your knees in the grass. You have to pick hundreds of flower heads - just the yellow petals, mind you, not the bitter green bits. You have to take time. But also make use of them before they lose their life and flavour. Yet still - there's no rushing this. Your knees will ache and get patchwork dent marks of grass on them. Your fingers will be stained.
But there you are. Close to the ground. Thinking things through. Connected to something older than you can name.
Bradbury believed that nothing once seen or heard truly disappears — that it's all still out there somewhere, vibrating, waiting to be found again. I think that's true of dandelion wine too. Pour a glass and somewhere in it is that Christmas picnic, that whole estranged, laughing family kneeling in a field, hands stained yellow.
Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers
OK you should probably just buy the book.
Here's what the kids did to me after we picked the flowers off ....stem treatment. x
Dandelion Wine Recipe in Summary - full recipe link below.
Makes about 4 litres
This is wild fermentation in its truest form - you're relying entirely on the natural yeasts present on the flowers and in the air. No commercial wine yeast needed. Just patience and faith in the invisible world.
The work:
Day 1 - The Picking
Go out in the morning after the dew has dried but before the heat of the day. You want flowers that are fully open, bright yellow, vital. Unsprayed obviously. Pick only from areas you know haven't been sprayed with chemicals. You'll need about 4 litres of loosely packed flower heads.
Sit somewhere comfortable. Now comes the meditative part: pull the yellow petals from each flower head, discarding all the green bits. The green is bitter and will make your wine harsh. Just the sunshine-yellow petals.
This takes time. An hour, maybe more. Your fingers will turn yellow. This is the bending-over part. The remembering-you-have-a-nose part. And a body. Don't rush it.
Day 1 - The Brewing
Day 3 or 4 - The Feeding
Days 4-14 - The Waiting
Yep. Wait. Watch. Listen. Peek inside to smell it...
Week 2 - The Bottling
Months 1-6 - The Maturing
This is where patience becomes your teacher. Young dandelion wine tastes... well, young. A bit rough. A bit sharp. Sometimes it kind of tastes like cat pee or .....nothing much. You might think it's not working, not delicious enough.
Give it time.
"Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in."
Store your bottles in a cool, dark place. Check on them occasionally. After a month, taste it. After three months, taste it again. After six months, it will have transformed into something golden and smooth and surprisingly complex - honey notes, citrus, a whisper of flowers, a hint of funk from the wild yeasts.
This is wine made from what most people call weeds. Wine made by bending over and getting your hands dirty. Wine made with time and trust in invisible forces.
A note on wild fermentation:
Sometimes the wild yeasts don't wake up. Sometimes the fermentation stalls. Sometimes you get flavours you didn't expect. This is the nature of working wild - you're in conversation with forces you can't fully control.
If your fermentation seems stuck, you can add a pinch of commercial wine yeast to help it along. No shame in that. Even wild fermentationists need backup plans sometimes.
If it tastes a bit funky or vinegary, that's likely acetobacter (vinegar bacteria) getting involved. It won't hurt you, but it might not be delicious. Trust your nose and your taste buds - hopefully you'll get there before you get - dandelion vinegar.
Peering Through at Winter
Bradbury writes about what happens when you open a bottle of dandelion wine in the depths of winter:
"And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day - the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, colour sky from iron to blue."
This is what fermentation gives us. Not just probiotics. Not just flavour. But the ability to hold time. To capture a moment - a summer afternoon, a lawn full of dandelions, your hands stained yellow with pollen - and preserve it. Transform it. Turn it into something that will sustain you when winter comes.
Every time we lose a fermentation tradition, every time someone's grandparent dies without passing on their recipe or methods, all the times we have anihilated a people or race, or shamed traditional foods, banned a food or drink for too long, the world is bankrupted of that specific knowledge. That specific touch.
I guess this is why I am drawn to teach. Tell stories, write books or here on this site... not knowing if anyone will read it.(?) And more romantically, why I have been known to bend over dandelion patches and remember I have a nose.
Not because fermentation is trendy or because probiotics are having a moment. But because these are practices that connect us - to our ancestors, to each other, to the invisible world of bacteria and yeasts that makes life possible.
Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher, Bradbury said.
And so is fermentation.
Nobody guesses, accuses, knows - but there you are, thinking things through, with your dandelions and buckets and your ancient, invisible allies.
There you are, doing work that we have done, and passed on for thousands of years. There you are, remembering you have a nose.
And maybe this spring - there you are, making wine from weeds, holding the sun in your hand.
For the full Dandelion Wine recipe click here.
There are so many good quotes in that beautiful book - please read it. Also - Stephen Buhners book - Sacred and Healing Herbal Beers.
This pic is of a glass of Dandelion Wine we found at a little shop in Curamont, France.
