Lilac Flower Wine - Harvesting Flowers

picking and preparing Lilac flowers

This is the second flower wine I plan to produce this year. Lilac flowers blossom in spring. In Saskatchewan that is around mid to end of May, depending on the year. It is very easy to find stands of common purple Lilac bushes in public areas. I found a luscious group of bushes in a valley within 10 minutes of my home. The tiny 4 petalled flowers are produced in small clumps which I am going to refer to as umbels. The umbels join to a common stem to form the beautiful spikes or panicles that we refer to collectively as the flowers. You may use scissors or sharp pruning shears to separate the spikes from the stems. I select spikes which have most of the flowers open (at the time I was picking there were not many spikes that had a least a few of the flowers closed at the tip). The spikes are quite large (4 or 5 inches long) and contain many umbels. I collected the spikes in a plastic pail. They are quite fluffy and I wouldn’t have been able to fit enough into my pail unless I pushed them down to remove some of the air spaces between the flowers.

Once I returned home I proceeded to remove the flower umbels from the spikes. The umbels are attached to the spike by a thin stem. I grab a handful and gently pull down to easily remove them from the spike. I have attached a picture of a group of umbels that have been removed.

You will notice that the green stems attaching the flower umbel to the spike are still present. I am not going to worry about them as there is no indication that they impart any flavor to the finished wine according to other wine makers.

I measured the flower umbels into a 500ml measuring cup, and pressed them down a little bit to remove some of the air spaces. They weighed approximately 50 g. The recipe I have planned for calls for 3 to 3 1/2 Litres of blossoms. That converts into 300 to 350g of flowers. I packed approximately 350g of flowers into a large plastic freezer bag and will store in the freezer until I am ready to start the fermentation.