hi I'm Phil toques owner and winemaker at the Grand View winery in East Calais we're gonna go into making dandelion wine now the first thing you need to do obviously is pick the dandelion so I'll spend some time showing you how to pick them to keep the bitterness out of the wine next we'll go through a little review of kind of equipment that you need things like a nice five-gallon bucket a five-gallon glass carboy an airlock a corker some corks some bottles you do have to decide how much you're going to make if you're only making a gallon a gallon jug will work just fine once we've got all the equipment together we'll then put together the wine itself adding the sugar and oranges and lemons add some yeast to it and let it start fermenting and once it's fermented for a while and it's ready then we'll bottle it wine doesn't go bad what happens it gets converted to vinegar so if you do something wrong it's going to either smell funny or taste money you're not going to drink it as far as the equipment in the process there isn't any real safety issues other than yes you are working with glass and if you do break a bottle just be careful with it and obviously if you drink too much of the wine maybe you'll be a little tipsy so how did I get started making dandelion wine I've made wine for fun for about 35 years and I tend to make the wine out of things that grow easily in Vermont grapes don't particularly fit that bill dandelions on the other hand are plentiful there's lots of them we actually started the winery in 1996 we've been here in East Calais we added a retail space over on route 100 just north of Ben & Jerry's we've made a number of wines that have won both national and international awards dandelion is kind of fun we're gonna go through the whole process so let's get started to watch the other segments in this video series or for how-to videos on almost any other topic visit monkey-see dot-com