Sweet Woodruff is a creeping herb often planted in shady area. Common in Europe and is used as a flavoring for Wines and deserts. Sweet Woodruff has no flavor fresh, it has to dry/ferment for its compounds to become active.
I planted Sweet Woodruff a few years ago and after a few years and one herbicide incident its spread enough to do something with. From what I read you do not want to give your planting a hair cut you want to harvest each sprig seperatly from all over the plant and its good to leave the lowest rings leaves intact. This is my first experiment with it.
In order to translate between sprigs and grams in I weight the 15 sprigs out as 7 grams. This will be important later when I try project 2. Sweet Woodruff syrup, the recipes i found call for 25-30g for every 250g of sugar.
This was interesting. I tasted the grassy hay note its supposed to have. But there is also this other flavor that is not possible to describe its like a cream liquor without the cream.
I’ve got some germination -hopefully successfully, after reading about it in English gardening history (& modern). Also might do well on my N-facing front garden, largely shaded. 'Twill probably be a few years even with germination success before I can try the wine but it’s on my list…
What wine did you use?A lot of what I’ve read seems to call for Rheinwein, or some cheap variant like “Blue Nun”. I suppose one of the $6-12 bottles of MI white available here (in MI) would work well.
Anyway, good to know others outside the UK are trying this!
We’ve made a bunch of oddball fruit and vegetable wines over the years. Some excellent, some putrid, many decently drinkable middling quality. I have a patch of sweet woodruff here, and see it out and about in the woods some. It’s a cool little plant. I’ve heard of may wine before but hadn’t made the connection.
I grabbed a rather sour $6 bottle. I covered the strawberries in sugar a few hours earlier to draw out their flavor and sweeten wine. The sweet woodruff caused a secondary fermentation, so it was ever so slightly sparkling.
I Hadn’t noted the strawberries… Those & the secondary fermentation sounds fantastic, maybe an evolution of the English (& German, etc.) tradition. Also rather summery - maybe “Julywine”? I’ll have to keep that in mind whenever I’m lucky enough to get my Woodruff patch established.
