Lavender Champagne

Lavender champagne is a new one for me. I have had lavender in tea, with meat and seen recipes including it in shortbread and ice-cream. The champagne recipe doesn’t add any yeast so I am assuming that fermenting microbes will come from the flowers, sultanas or the air. My friend who gave me the recipe has never tried it so I will be leaving this bubbling away in my caravan for a week and hopefully return to a fragrant beverage.

I had to adjust the recipe to use limes instead of the suggested lemon - because I had no lemon and I fancied the aromatics of lime more. I converted amounts from ounces and pints to grams and litres. Being brought up with the metric system and with the simplicity of multiples of ten I find it easier to tailor recipes to the abundance of ingredients using metric.

As well as adding sweetness, flavour and possibly yeast the sultanas are included as a source of tartaric acid and this has a role in supporting the growth of yeast which is the element that turns the sugar into alcohol and adds the bubbles.

When collecting your lavender watch out for bees as lavender in bloom is a bee magnet. Don’t put in the flower stalk, just the tip of the stalk that the flowers are attached to. Lavender produces different secondary metabolites in the flowers and stalks to suit the different purposes of those structures. The flowers are attractive to insects and the leaves and stems contain chemicals that are repellent to insects. Hence the noticeably different smell of those two different parts of the plant. I am definitely going for the light floral flavours of the flowers rather than the sharper flavour of the stem.

Lavender champagne recipe

Ingredients:

• 40 lavender flower heads
• 100g finely chopped sultanas
• 300g sugar
• Juice of 2 limes
• 2 tablespoons white vinegar
• 2 litres boiled water that has cooled to room temperature

Method:

• Mix the lavender flower heads, sultanas and sugar in a large ceramic or glass bowl
• Add lime juice, white vinegar and boiled water
• Cover with muslin and leave to stand for 7 days (the muslin stops flies getting in and allows the yeast to grow in aerobic conditions)
• Bottle in sterilised bottles; either plastic screw top bottles or glass bottles using new corks. 

The original recipe states tht it should be ready to drink straight away. However I suspect it will be worth leaving in the bottle for at least a few days to have a fizzier and less sugary drink.