Carrot Wine

I know I said sweet potato wine would be the next root veggie wine on the agenda, but I called an audible and moved carrot wine up the list because, well, sweet potatoes will last longer than carrots and I didn't want my carrots to go bad, so here we are. Also, I have decided to add a recipe section to the website in case any of the 4 or 5 people who actually visit my site want to give what I'm making a whirl. That section will be coming soon, stay tuned. I've also been doing a little research on winemaking in the rural American south, so more of these "non-traditional" wines will be making their way into the fermenter.

Now you may wonder, why make wine out of carrots or really anything else but grapes, since grapes make perfectly good wine? One answer may be that wine grapes (vitis vinifera) are very different even from the grapes you find in the grocery store. They grow in very specific regions and are not readily available to everyone, so you gotta work with what you have. Of course some had fruits like apples, blueberries, blackberries, etc., but others just had veggies, so that's what they used. Necessity being the mother of invention, carrot wine is just one of those wines (like beet and even dandilion) that rural folks made because they had carrots and wanted a fermented beverage now and then. We'll dive deeper into that another time.

As far as winemaking difficulty goes, this wasn't terribly hard, significantly less messy than the beet wine although the food processor helped cut down on the mess of slicing and preparation. The carrots don't need to be peeled, a lot of the color and flavor comes from the peel but they did need to be scrubbed before slicing, and a plastic scouring pad took care of that in fairly short order. This wine is made from the standard garden variety orange carrots, but I'm sure you can use baby carrots or purple carrots or pretty much any other variety you happen to have. I started with a basic recipe I found online, and augmented it just a bit to suit my taste and because I thought it might need a little help. I read where carrot wines could taste a little thin, so I added some raisins and honey for body, and used light brown sugar to give it a little more flavor. The color looks like it may end up being a light rust color, but we'll see how it looks once the wine clears after aging a bit. I used a dark wildflower honey and regular black raisins because that's what I already had in the pantry, using a lighter colored honey and golden raisins would very likely lighten the color significantly. Going with a semi-dry white wine yeast, Lalvin 71B, and we'll age it for 3-6 months after bottling to let it mature. I've never tasted carrot wine, so I don't have any idea what the end result will be, I'm envisioning something like a semi-dry white wine but maybe with a little stronger flavor, although at this point that's just a guess. It'll spend a week in primary fermentation then I'll rack it into a carboy for secondary fermentation. I'll taste it at each step, maybe that'll give some clarity to what the end result is likely to be. If it tastes good enough for an encore, we'll churn out another batch, maybe with modifications to the recipe. Cheers!