Mint Wine

I'm not kidding. It sounds a bit odd, and you'll question the outcome at various stages along the way.

Looking at our notes, we actually wrote "Don't bother making again" in the notes! A year after starting the wine, however, we're really glad we made it.

This wine ferments lightly and sloooowly. If you have some patience, you'll be glad you stuck it out.

This is a light, sweet, unique wine.. great served chilled. It’s a very thin bodied wine, by design. A more full bodied wine wouldn’t work so well with the flavour profile of this one, IMHO. We like this one best with a bit of carbonation.

Other than that, mint is easy to make, and SUPER cheap if you - like a lot of people I know - have a patch of mint that's bent on taking over your yard.

Homemade Mint Wine is a great summer project!

How to Make Mint Wine

If you haven't attempted making wine before, don't be intimidated! Check out our primer to home brewing:

- Wine Making At Home, Part 1: Why?

- Wine Making at Home, Part 2: Equipment to Get Started

- Wine Making at Home, Part 3: The Brewing Process.

- Wine Making at Home, Part 4: How to Stabilize and Back Sweeten Wine

Just a small handful of entries, and you'll be good to go!

Mint Wine Ingredients

Spring Water

While using tap water can be an option, we opt to use jugs of spring water, for a couple of reasons..

First of all, life in Minneapolis opened our eyes to the fact that tap water doesn’t always taste good. While our water here in Hamilton always tastes fresh and clean (without a filter even!), we know that’s not the case for everyone. Bottled spring water won’t introduce any weird, undesirable flavours to your wine.

Additionally, there’s the convenience factor. Not only is it clean tasting, it’s pre-measured, sterile, and handy.

However, if your tap water is consistently tasty and safe, feel free to use that instead of bottled.

Mint

We use fresh mint out of the garden. You can use whatever variety of mint you happen to be growing - if you like to eat it, you’ll likely enjoy the wine it makes.

Wash the mint well, pull the leaves off the stems, and pack the leaves well when measuring.

I like to crush the leaves by hand when adding it to the pot - this will release the flavours a little more.

Sugar

Type of Sugar

In terms of type of sugar, we prefer to use plain white granulated sugar for this wine. It’s a good neutral flavour, and I really think that brown sugar or maple syrup would overwhelm the mint flavour.

How to Make Mint Mead

If you’d like to make a mead rather than a wine, you can swap the sugar out for honey. We’ll usually use 4-5 lbs of honey for this.

A couple notes:

- I say “Mint Mead”, as that’s what most people would understand... but mead with herbs would technically called a “metheglin” -

So, swapping sugar out in favour of honey would give you a mint metheglin. The more you know!

- When you’re using honey instead of sugar, you’re going to want to be careful in your choice of honey. Where white sugar is fairly neutral in flavour, honey can be aggressively flavoured.

I recommend picking something lightly coloured and lightly flavoured - a clover or orange blossom honey, for instance.

Something like a wildflower or buckwheat honey is likely to completely overwhelm the flavour from the mint.

Alcohol Content

Aside from flavour, there’s the matter of alcohol content.

Your wine’s final ABV will vary wildly dependent on a couple things: how much sugar you add, and what kind of yeast you use (more on that in a bit)

Any amount of sugar will result in a higher alcohol content than making the same wine without sugar added. Sugar - both in the base wine itself, and from the added sugars - is what feeds the yeast, the yeast eats up the sugars and gives off alcohol as the byproduct of that process.

More sugar = more food = more alcohol... to a point, anyway. About that...

Yeast

The type of yeast you use will impact the alcohol content of the final product.

Yeast organisms don’t have an *unlimited* capacity to process sugar into alcohol. At some point, the environment they’re living in - the brewing wine - becomes too high in alcohol for the yeast to survive. They die off, the fermentation stops.

Different types of yeast have different tolerances for alcohol in the environment. That is, some yeast will be able to survive higher amounts of alcohol in the wine, so they’ll continue producing it longer than some other types.

Some types of yeast will bring you to something like an 8% ABV, while others will let things run wild until close to 20% ABV.

It’s good to know what you have in mind, when you choose your yeast. For this wine, we’ll usually use a white / champagne type yeast.

Back Sweetening Your Homemade Mint Wine

Sometimes - usually, even - you’ll find that the yeast went a bit too far with their smorgasbord, and you end up with a Mint wine that’s not as sweet as you’d like it.

... and that’s when you back sweeten it! You can read my How to Stabilize and Back Sweeten Wine post for information on how to back sweeten it.

How to Make Sparkling Mint Wine

As I’d mentioned earlier, mint wine is especially nice as a bubbly beverage. There are two main ways to accomplish this, both of which happen AFTER fermentation has ceased.

Note: Consult your local homebrew store for what your options are when it comes to bottling sparkling wine. As this ferments a bit in the bottle, normal wine bottles aren’t a good idea - they can explode from the extra pressure.

We’ll usually use beer bottle and caps for any sparkling wine or sparkling ciders that we make, but there are options more along the lines of champagne bottles. Selection and brands tend to vary wildly by location.

Anyway!

For Naturally Carbonated Sparkling Mint Wine

In a small pot, mix together 1 cup of water with 1 cup of sugar. Use a sanitized funnel to pour this into a sanitized large carboy.

Rack the wine over into this carboy, swirling it as you go.

Bottle the wine into appropriate bottles, following directions for whatever kind of cap/closure you will be using.

Allow wine to age at least a month or two – residual yeast will ferment the added sugar, carbonating the wine. Serve chilled.

For Force-Carbonated Sparkling Mint Wine

Alternatively, you can rack the wine (without the added sugar syrup!) into a keg and force carbonate it, if you have the set up for that - That’s what we tend to do with our ciders.

Making Larger Batches of Wine

Do you have a TON of mint to use up? Good news: you can easily scale this wine recipe up - in fact, there's a function inside the recipe card itself to do the math for you!

One note, though: You don't need to multiply the yeast, but the software doesn't know that. We will use one pouch of yeast for anything from 1-5x batches, and then 1 pouch for every 5x batches beyond that.

As a related note: The recipe software is definitely geared towards cooking, not wine making. Therefore, you can pretty much ignore all of the info it gives you: The nutritional info is calculated on everything that goes into the wine.

It does not take into account how much sugar will be fermented out, how much volume is lost to racking, the fact that the fruit pulp is removed before the final product, etc.

More Home Brewing Recipes!

While you've got your current homebrew fermenting away, why not consider putting a batch of something else on, to occupy your wait time? Here are a few of my other wine, cider, and mead recipes:

Wine Recipes

Banana Wine Recipe
Blackberry Wine Recipe
Blackcurrant Wine Recipe
Blueberry Wine Recipe
Cherry Wine Recipe
Cranberry Clementine Christmas Wine Recipe
Cranberry Wine Recipe
Faux Lingonberry Wine
Lychee Wine Recipe
Mango Strawberry Wine Recipe
Mango Wine Recipe
Lychee Wine Recipe
Partridgeberry Wine Recipe
Passionfruit Wine Recipe
Peach Wine Recipe
Stone Fruit Wine Recipe
Strawberry Wine Recipe
Ube Wine Recipe
Watermelon Wine Recipe

Mead Recipes

Black Cherry Mead Recipe
Blueberry-Clementine Mead Recipe
Blueberry Mead Recipe
Clementine Mead Recipe
Pumpkin Mead Recipe
Wildflower Mead Recipe

Cider & Miscellaneous Homebrew Recipes

Hard Apple Cider Recipe
Home Brew Hard Iced Tea Recipe
Maple Hard Apple Cider Recipe

Share the Love!

Before you drink up, be sure to take some pics of your handiwork! If you Instagram it, be sure to tag me - @CelebrationGenerationCA - or post it to My Facebook Page - so I can cheer you on!

Also, be sure to subscribe to my free monthly email newsletter, so you never miss out on any of my nonsense.

Well, the published nonsense, anyway!