Sunday 12 October 2008

It's wine making time

We used to make wine several years ago but with me working all over the country, we stopped. A couple of years ago we started again, firstly making sloe vodka and last year following a glut of bullaces (wild plums) we made a very enjoyable plum wine. Which according to one of our neighbours "was not a wine to start drinking standing up!!!!!".
This year my black current bush produced a 1lb of fruit, which is not enough to do anything with, so I put them in the freezer, and with the glut of blackberries around at the moment, I've got a gallon of black current and bramble wine fermenting away in the utility room.
Whilst Phillippa was here, after my birthday, she was lamenting that she and her mum had missed bramble picking season with moving to Scotland, so we spent a couple of hours on the common land, armed with buckets, picking brambles. Between us we picked 6lbs of brambles, enough for Phillippa to take some home to make jam, and for me to make a gallon of bramble wine, which again is fermenting away in the utility room.
Last week we cut back an elderberry bush, so I picked the ripe berries, a full 9lbs in all. The berries took some getting off the stalks, but after a few days fermenting in a bucket, we racked off the juice into a large fermenting vessel, which holds 5 gallons of wine, it's half full and bubbling away. The utility room smells very yeasty and you don't want to hang around in there for too long otherwise you could end up feeling very light headed!!!!!
None of the wine will be ready for at least a year................

1 comment:

Caroline M said...

We are on our second batch of kit lager. The first one was nearly a disaster as it was a bit lively during its second fermentation and the bottom of the pressure vessel expanded to half a sphere. Luckily at this point it fell over (even more luckily, not falling off the kitchen counter) and we realised that we had a problem. The next day the brewing husband set off for Europe leaving me with the bomb in waiting. Oh how I laughed. I was just glad that he hadn't bottled it.