Ben's Adventures in Wine Making

It has been a long time since we opened a bottle of Julia's ancient wines. When this one was being made, I was sitting my Law Society Fi...

What better to go with fish pie than a bottle of elderflower wine? Quite a lot, it turns out. The first taste was on the verge of rancid. Ho...

One of the reasons I chose this bottle for the House Warming Pary was so I could say to Charles "I didn't recognise you with your c...

It is a rare occasion that I ask a naked man if I can pick elderflowers from his garden. This was one such occurrence. The tree I eve...

We had already opened two bottles of wine on Sunday before getting stuck into the Elderflower. But it is not every day that you create the w...

I opened this bottle after our first WYSO rehearsal for the summer term. Mostly we are playing crowd-pleasing medleys (James Bond, Phantom o...

This was an Easter Sunday bottle of wine, drunk to a slab or roast pork with crackling done to perfection. We are in Newcastle and Andrew wa...

It is half-term this week, and therefore no WYSO. Instead I spent Wednesday evening in Wakefield at Nick's discussing the Pontefract con...

This term, WYSO is playing music inspired by Shakespeare. On Wednesday night we came home having played Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet...

Let There Be Light. The House now has working electricity. I flick a switch and lights go on. This is new and miraculous, and I can't te...

Of the four movements in Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, it is the second that I love the most. It has a mournful, beautiful melody passe...

Elderflower is a reliable white wine with little variance between years. It has a semi-sweet floral taste: distinctive and summery. Mid-June...

Having the Parents over was wonderful, but it was nice when they left. Claire and I had spent a disturbed night between Saturday and Sunday,...

This bottle began life as a post-WYSO snifter. It is our concert in a week and a bit, and Wednesday was our last go through Schumann's F...

This bottle did for both Friday and Saturday, which suggests temperance. An argument might be made in that direction for Saturday, but on Fr...

Not one of Julia's best. This wine was drinkable but was thin and not very interesting. The elderflower taste was hardly there. I apolog...

I started this bottle on Thursday night while watching The Missing  on i-player. It has been a terrific, if bleak, series so far and there i...

Perhaps drinking an entire bottle on a Wednesday is not the best of ideas. However, it was the Great British Bake Off final. For each previ...

On Sunday Claire dragged me to the British Wool Festival in Harrogate. Rather than spend the £8 entrance fee to look at coloured yarn, I spe...

I shared this bottle with Sue Jones in St Dogmaels , over grilled mackrel caught the day before. It was a lovely meal and elderflower goes w...