Wine is the fermented juice of the grape, or is it? Legally speaking, the statement is true in the European Union where wine is only to be made from grapes or grape must. The United States, on the other hand, allows for a broader definition of wine that can include other fruits, sugars, and substitutions, although so-called “standard wine” is derived from grapes. But less legal-minded wine-makers know about recipes that have nothing to do with grapes. Berries, flowers, sugar, and honey can all make sweet or dry drinks that have wielded the title of wine. Sadly, legal definitions helped to push some of these homemade wines into obscurity. Once a common tradition in rural America, flower wine was already on the decline in the early 1900s, and Prohibition hastened its demise by legally defining flowers as not fruit.
Rural Americans inherited a wine-making habit from their English ancestry, making seasonal wines from plants foraged from their immediate surroundings. Grapes in North America were either native (and unsuitable for wine-making) or imported (and impossible to cultivate.) White European settlers had to opt for other sources of sugar and flavor if they wanted to ferment wines at home.
Flower and berry wines evolved in a thousand year old medicinal tradition of infusing herbs and flowers into alcohols to extract their essences. The practice is not limited to the English countryside: Koreans have long brewed sool with flowers, Arab people love to drink non-alcoholic karkedeh, and indigenous Chileans were known to make a chicha from Darwin Barberries (chicha de calafate) and Chilean rhubarb (chicha de nalca). (Plath)
When the British settled on the Atlantic coast of North America, they brought some of their favorite garden plants with them. Many, especially the virulent dandelion, spread across the territory inhabited by British settlers and even made their way into indigenous herbology.
Among the popular petals were roses, elderflowers, and dandelions. Stalky rhubarb, too, spouted into garden wine. In addition to being cheap, easy to grow, and plentiful, many of these wines had medicinal qualities. Dandelion had long been prized for its curative applications, written about by philosophers as early as Avicenna. In England, the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, wrote in his 1747 Primitive physic: or An easy and natural method of curing most diseases about using “the milky juice of all the sowthistles, dandelions, and lettuces” to cure a “Violent Coughing from a sharp and thin Rheum.” Some said it was good for liver disease. Wine from the cowslip helped one to fall asleep and could cure children of measles. Rhubarb wine aided indigestion. Elderberry or elderflower were good for all kinds of disease. And currant wine warded off winter’s cold.
In place of expensive imported grape wines, cottage wines like these were staples of countryside life. They expressed thrift from foraging, seasonality in taste, and healthfulness in consumption. On the downside, they were labor intensive to make, and by the end of the 19th century, the wines were in decline. Soon, they would disappear almost entirely.
Helen S Wright published a broad overview of domestic American wine-making in 1909 titled, Old-Time Recipes for Home Made Wines, Cordials and Liqueurs from Fruits, Flowers, Vegetables, and Shrubs. She opens her book of recipes with a vignette of old school New England that is remembered only by widows whose men were lost to sea and towns whose glory was lost to time. She writes about visiting these matriarchs, “Cake and wine were invariably served as a preliminary warning toward early departure. Here came in my first acquaintance with many varieties of home-made wines, over whose wealth of color and delicacy of flavor my eyes and palate longed to linger.” Long before 1909, it would have been common to call upon a family and enjoy a glass of a wine made from some convenient crop, but by the 20ths century the tradition had faded.
Other writers around this time heralded the dying art of cottage wines. An 1899 article in the New York Tribune called the wines “Old-fashioned” and described them as “that springtime blood purifier beloved by our grandmothers.” The New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayne, wrote in 1909 about how English countryside wines were a “Long Neglected Art.” While in 1915, the Cleveland Gazette wrote, “the flavor of gooseberry wine was known and esteemed by most of the grandmothers and grandfathers of present Washingtonians.”
Traditional cottage wines appeared in the early 20th century as elements of nostalgia–dusty bottles in grandma’s pantry. They were still known, but fast fading. Soon, however, the wines made from the flowers in America’s backyards would have their 15 minutes of fame. As Americans stared down the barrel of Prohibition, they became keen on the potential idea of quenching their thirst for alcohol by making wine at home.
Scarcity led to resourcefulness. In the early years of Prohibition, the Trenton Evening Times hinted to its readers, “the thirsty and disappointed ones may take notice that there is a great dandelion bloom this year, and that dandelion blossoms are said to make a wine of agreeable taste and possessing more of a ‘kick’ than was to be found in many of the beers of pleasant memory.” In the 1980s, a Pennsylvania project that documented the oral history of the Prohibition era recorded the words of a local, “the wild berries were all picked during Prohibition, now they all rot…My mother made beautiful wine, dandelion blossom and elderberry blossom wine.” (Herbert) The law forced Americans to recollect the traditions of their great-grandparents, but such wines, specifically dandelion and other flower wines, would quickly turn sour in the eyes of the law.
In 1921, a Minneapolis man went to prison for 30 days for making dandelion wine! (Duluth News-Tribune, 26 June 1921) A year later, a Delaware man by the name of Stephan Dowell was fined $500 plus costs for illegally possessing dandelion wine. (Plain Dealer, 25 May 1922) Ultimately, the Federal Prohibition Commissioner Haynes, who oversaw the national ban on the sale of alcohol, made a ruling: flowers were not fruit. (Oregonian, 18 May 1922) While homemade wine from fruit was permitted, flowers now fell on the wrong side of the law. It was a safer option to buy grapes or dried bricks of grapes made by companies like Vino Sano for home wine production.
After 10 years of Prohibition, the already distant memory of cottage wines became a relic. The grape wine industry had a hard enough time recovering from the decade long ban on commercial fermentation. America’s public had developed a taste for homemade grape wine and bootleg cocktails made of gin and whiskey. The flower and berry wines of yore were no more.
Cottage wines became obscure and nostalgic, but did not disappear entirely. Modern American wine-makers sometimes offer rose wines and dandelion wines for the craft-genre drinkers. Uncles and aunts around the States who sit on a decent enough property still ferment yearly bottles from the plants that grow without cultivation. Today, the dandelion is notoriously a weed, and other flowers suitable for wine production may not number in the pages of the modern layman’s botany.
Nostalgia. Flower and berry wines have been nostalgic for well over 100 years. Spring is bottled and stoppered until winter comes; the flavor itself is a remembrance of times past. Famed author Ray Bradbury, who was born into Prohibition, wrote a piece in a 1953 edition of Gourmet Magazine that later became a full length book titled Dandelion Wine. He sums up the collective taste for the bucolical in the piece, having sipped flower wine in his own youth. Bradbury waxes, “Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer in a bottle. It was all the warm afternoons and the cloudless skies, stoppered tight; to be opened, said the label, on a January day with snow falling fast.”
Bradbury, R. (1953, June). Dandelion Wine. Gourmet.
“Dandelion Wine.” Trenton Evening Times, 3 June 1920, p. 6. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1236872C1F6A0AE3%40EANX-123896F0A9E95EC0%402422479-12374BD5F2BFB300%405-125687AF7B5E8AB3%40Dandelion%2BWine. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
“Dandelion Wine Barred. Federal Commissioner Rules That Flowers Are Not Fruit.” Oregonian, vol. LXI, no. 19186, 18 May 1922, p. [1]. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A11A73E5827618330%40EANX-11D63FB4404E9530%402423193-11D63FB44BB475C0%400-11D63FB5D233C270%40Dandelion%2BWine%2BBarred.%2BFederal%2BCommissioner%2BRules%2BThat%2BFlowers%2BAre%2BNot%2BFruit. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
Herbert, James R. “An oral history of the Prohibition era, Indiana County, Pennsylvania.” Western Pennsylvania History: 1918-2018 (1983): 335-346.
“Given Dandelion Wine Fine.” Plain Dealer, 25 May 1922, p. 15. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A122AFBBA107AC9E4%40EANX-123499C96CC1A058%402423200-122FAC02AEB35280%4014-124969ED69435428%40Given%2BDandelion%2BWine%2BFine. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
Plath, Oreste. Aportaciones populares sobre el vino y la chicha: compilación de normas, creencias, costumbres y motivos de la cultura tradicional chilena. Instituto de Lingüistica UNC, 1962.
“Old-Fashioned Dandelion Wine.” New York Tribune, 27 May 1899, p. 7. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1284B46450E6EE32%40EANX-12EA923599FE05B0%402414802-12EA29B00C4FE2D0%406-131D1070C5F23F2B%40Old-Fashioned%2BDandelion%2BWine. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
“Some Of The Old ‘Tipples’ Early Housekeepers Had Many Recipes That Have Been Handed Down.” Cleveland Gazette, 26 June 1915, p. 4. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A12B716FE88B82998%40EANX-12BC1B1D69E0C3A0%402420675-12BA063B9B0DE358%403-12D5C366289F8940%40Some%2BOf%2BThe%2BOld%2B%2522Tipples%2522%2BEarly%2BHousekeepers%2BHad%2BMany%2BRecipes%2BThat%2BHave%2BBeen%2BHanded%2BDown. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
“The Wines Of England. Their Making Now a Long Neglected Art.” Times-Picayune, 4 Jan. 1909, p. 12. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1223BCE5B718A166%40EANX-122B0C3E2CFC1530%402418311-1228C672C63EADB8%4011-12D42258D0215560%40The%2BWines%2BOf%2BEngland.%2BTheir%2BMaking%2BNow%2Ba%2BLong%2BNeglected%2BArt. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
“To Jail for Danelion Wine.” Duluth News-Tribune, vol. 53, no. 44, 26 June 1921, p. [32]. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1156D7F7D713A378%40EANX-11910143EF130A68%402422867-11910144DC505E08%4031-1191014B9C9AFB98%40To%2BJail%2Bfor%2BDanelion%2BWine. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
Wichita Times, 14 Aug. 1975, p. 9. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A12E5A428B4E64838%40EANX-12E6329406DEBA60%402442639-12E5EF7BF68B2A50%408-12F0CB198CD9FE48%40%255BNo%2BHeadline%255D. Accessed 13 Oct. 2022.
Wright, Helen S., and Katherine Golden Bitting Collection on Gastronomy. Old-Time Recipes for Home Made Wines, Cordials and Liqueurs from Fruits, Flowers, Vegetables, and Shrubs. Estes, 1909.
During the Month of Ramadan, Sudanese Muslims fast together and break fast in the same way. Across the country, everyone drinks hulu mur in the evening, a beverage made by infusing a sorghum bread into water. The mixture is made in the late afternoon, so no alcohol is fermented. Hulu mur serves as a nutritional breakfast and a point of national pride.
In Ghana, palm wine has been an important cultural drink for centuries. Europeans introduced distillation, and palm wine was distilled into akpeteshie. When British colonial government attempted to tax spirits in Ghana, locals opted to distill their gin at home. The drink became a symbol of pride and anti-colonial sentiment. Since independence, the spirit has been legal and culturally salient.
Summerville, South Carolina has recently dubbed itself “The Birthplace of Sweet Tea.” While some across the American South may take issue with the historical accuracy of the claim, Summerville has a unique history of growing tea, producing tea, and drinking tea. Tea has also long brought tourists to the quaint Southern town.
Modern soda was made possible by the discovery of an Englishman named Joseph Priestley. A close friend of Benjamin Franklin, the chemist discovered how to artificially introduce carbon dioxide into water. While early scientists thought the drink had medicinal benefits, the discovery heralded the start of the soda industry including the founding of Schweppe’s in 1783. Surprisingly, carbonated drinks had close ties with the founding fathers.
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