A Grave Success…the origin

In the summer of 2024 I finally learned how to make wine.

Wine-making was something I had always had an interest in. I particularly wanted to mash the grapes with my feet—that seemed like extraordinary fun. In fact, while I was still in university I was strongly considering pursuing the Working Holiday visa in New Zealand, where my plan was to approach a vineyard with my fancy new Film degree and offer to make a documentary of their winery if, in return, they taught me how to make wine.

I made the mistake of incorporating my boyfriend at the time in on these plans, and when that relationship melted, so, in my heartbreak, did my enthusiasm for the project.

Wine, therefore, was put on a shelf (pun intended) in my mind. But a particular song brought me back in the summer of 2024. It was a song I had come across in high school and then forgotten about, but its lyrics, which waxed poetic about the “summers of dandelion wine,” had always conjured in my mind an image of warm, hazy summer evenings with few cares but many friends:

“Days turn into yesteryear…
Pressed flowers and dreams we had…
Let's laugh at the memories, and talk all afternoon…
The first moment we ever met, when your eyes met mine...
I remember the summers of Dandelion Wine...”

I decided it was time to make that dandelion wine that had always filled me with such romantic notions. I gathered a tote bag and skipped over to the nearby park, just to discover, to my dismay, that the grassy field which only yesterday had been speckled with dandelions, had been mowed! Not a dandelion head in sight. Oh, this was a catastrophe. Where could I go that they wouldn’t mow the lawn? The solution popped into my mind. Just down the road was the historic St. Joseph Cemetery, with its birch tree-lined walkways and crumbling old monumental tombstones covered in ivy. They definitely wouldn’t be cutting the grass there, and, most likely, also wouldn’t be spraying any pesticides.

I would regularly return to the cemetery after this to forage for dandelions and nettles, which produce an almost smokey-flavoured wine that reminds me of whiskey without the punch. One day, the name for this funny little macabre wine of mine came to me: A Grave Success. The tagline followed quickly: “Wine so good, it just might kill you!”

Nowadays, I get the ingredients for our commercial wines from much more conventional sources (ie. produce suppliers), but I do still return to the cemetery each summer, when it’s time to make that year’s dandelion wine.