Forsythia is edible in small quantities, we cannot guarantee that it is safe to consume as a concentrated wine.
Two springs ago, as the tulips pushed through soil still textured by frost and the robins returned to poke at worms fresh out of estivation (that’s what worm hibernation is called), I noticed a brilliant forsythia bush blooming on Cape Cod. In the bleak, wind-washed landscape of late winter along the Atlantic Ocean, the forsythia was a hint of the sunny summer that would bring life back to this place. It was the start of the season, and I wanted to capture it.
I poked around some foraging guides and discovered that the bugle-like yellow flowers could be plucked and eaten as garnishes on garden salads or infused into tea or simple syrup. Seizing the brilliant bounty of the bush, I picked a bucket of petals and boiled them down with sugar into a cocktail syrup. They added a honeysuckle like quality to the sweet concoction and made excellent, floral gin sours.
One spring ago, the forsythia tempted again, but the cocktail syrup had faded too soon. You can only capture the yellow life of the bush, which turns into a drab green lawn ornament for the other 11 months of the year, for a couple of weeks before your simple syrup expires. I thought, “There must be a way to capture that yellow sunshine in a bottle.”
I turned to the other yellow harbinger of summer–the reliable dandelion. In suburban America, the dandelion is loathed as a weed, invading the uniformity of a well-kept lawn. In reality, though, the early spring dandelion is a culinary delight. Its fresh leaflets are nice bitter greens for salads, and its flowers are good flavor and medicine in wine. Its cousin, chicory, lends its root to a palatable coffee substitute. Surely, a dandelion wine could be made with a different yellow flower.
With a recipe for dandelion wine in hand, I began looking around for a clean, public, and bountiful supply of forsythia. As the bloom wore on and reached its efflorescence, I found a healthy, entangled patch of bushes at a park. About two weeks after the first yellow petals bloomed, and just before the buds of the green leaves emerged, I recruited my girlfriend and a couple of Tupperwares and headed to the park.
The network of forsythia shrubs was full of little pollinators enjoying the sweet bloom. Ants stumbled along the arching boughs with little blonde wigs of pollen stuck to their heads. The flowers were wide open in a spread, banana-peel shape. We picked for hours, accumulating one gallon of compressed flowers without over-depleting any single bush. At one point, an on-looker asked us what we were doing. “Making wine!,” we yelled.
Returning with a basket of flowers, we reserved a cup of petals for syrup. The rest we steeped in one gallon of distilled water for two hours. The resulting tea smelled of honey and had a light, tawny color. We sweetened the tea with one pound and one half of cane sugar and one cup of raw honey. The tea became cloudy and took on the aroma of candy.
We zested and juiced three lemons and three oranges. The juices were poured in with little change to the sweetened tea. The zest, we combined with a pound of chopped raisins which we stirred into the hot mixture. It quickly became the color of a light beer. After cooling, we pitched wine yeast into the vat. Then we funneled it into a fermenter with an airlock.
For the first couple of days, the mixture bubbled away in a five-gallon carboy. The zest and raisins bobbed up with the gas from the yeast and circulated back to the bottom. They were slowly devoured into a colorless mush.The off-gas smelled of citrus and booze like a yeasty mimosa. We agitated the fermentation daily for two weeks.
At the end of two weeks, we filtered all of the solids out of the solution with cheese cloth. The wine was put into a secondary jug and left to sit with an airlock for a month. When absolutely no bubbles were present, the bottle was corked.
From March until January, the bottle aged and clarified in the cellar. Before drinking, we siphoned the gallon jug into smaller bottles and let them chill.
How did this experiment turn out? Tart, bitter, extremely dry. The citrus clearly had an influence, and it seems the forsythia may have had a strong bitter element, but with some ice cubes to water it down, it was refreshing and crisp. I cannot guarantee that the forsythia is safe to drink in high concentrations, so we only sipped small amounts.
The experiment was not a disappointment, just a more astringent result than expected. Perhaps, what we captured in the bottle was not the flavor of summer, but of the brisk early spring–the time that the forsythia comes out and braves the bleak end of winter with bracing brilliance of yellow. This, perhaps, is the best way to preserve that moment in time, the brisk bloom of the forsythia.
1 gallon compact forsythia flowers (no greens) I would probably use less, maybe ½ gallon, in hopes of decreasing bitterness
1 gallon DH2O
3 lemons, juiced and zested
3 oranges, juiced and zested
1.5 pounds cane sugar
1 cup raw honey
1 pound raisins, chopped
1 packet wine yeast
Pick clean flowers avoiding any greens. For measurement, push the flowers down without too much force, but enough to get most of the air out.
Boil the water. Once boiling, pour all of the petals into the water and steep for 2 hours. Mix in the sugar and honey.
Juice and zest the lemons and limes. Add all of the juice to the mixture. Chop the raisins and add to the mixture with the zest. Allow the mixture to cool. Pitch yeast and siphon into a clean fermenting vessel with an airlock or balloon.
Allow the wine to ferment for 2 weeks. Rack off the wine and remove all solids with cheese cloth. Allow to ferment with an airlock until all evidence of fermentation ceases. Bottle and cork and age for at least 6 months.
Before drinking, cold-crash or rack the wine off of any lees. Serve chilled with ice. Ruminate upon the first signs of spring.
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