Herbal wines can be made from the leaves, flowers, fruits, and roots of any edible herb from lavender, elderberry, elderflower, chamomile, and parsley to ginger, aloe vera, tea, peppermint, and lemongrass . Herbal tea traditionally has been valued for its medicinal properties and for a variety of problems such as ovarian cancer, weak bones, cancer, and strokes. Evidence for success is variable. My paternal grandmother, Helen S. Wright, included two recipes for sage wine with no reference to their medicinal properties. The two recipes differ most significantly in the kind of sage they use, which no doubt affects the ailments the brew might help. The recipe presented here calls for red sage (Salvia miltorrhiza) also called redroot sage, Chinese sage, or danshen. It is valued in traditional Chinese medicine for treating various cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Photo Credit Raffi Kojian – http://Gardenology.org, Wikimedia Commons
Here is the recipe for [red] sage wine in the words of my grandmother:
Boil five quarts of water one-quarter of an hour, and when it is blood-warm put five pounds of Malaga raisins, picked, rubbed and shred, into it with almost three and one-quarter quarts of red sage shred, and a little of ale yeast. Stir all well together and let it stand in a tub covered warm six or seven days; then strain it off and put in a runlet. Let it work three or four days, and then stop it up. When it has stood six or seven days put in a quart of two of Malaga sherry, and when it is fine, bottle it.
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