Gooseberry Wine - First Bottle (4), 5th July 2013

After the frankly terrible 'Gooseberry and Elderflower 2012', it is a relief to report that 'Gooseberry 2012' is really rather good. It has a sharp, dry taste and the gooseberry flavour is distinctive.

Claire got home late after an extremely busy day at work sequencing the DNA of bladder cancer, and I gave her the choice of this or blackcurrant (which is ordinarily her favourite). With the weather being properly hot and having a plate of home grown salad, chilled gooseberry was the preferred option.

I spent much of the bottle clearing the kitchen in preparation for putting the elderflower into its demijohns, and then performing the said task. So another Friday night of living on the edge.

A somewhat poor photo of our sald from the garden

If you want to see how I made this wine, click here.

Christmas Tutti Fruti - Eighth Bottle (B1), 3rd-4th July 2013

Pomp and Circumstance March Number One is a dreadful piece of music. Particularly when played badly. It has no subtlety and there is nothing interesting or exciting about it. Perhaps it is a metaphor for this wine, which is firmly in the 'okay' category. So scratch that. Pomp and Circumstance is definitely worse than 'okay'. WYSO has to play it for the Pontefract Castle concert, but we do so under protest.

Our Wednesday night glass was Christmas Tutti Fruti because this was voted 'most likely to explode'. I noticed the cork creeping out of the bottle on Monday so carried it carefully to the fridge. We finished the bottle on Thursday, some of which I spent watching The Returned, an intriguing French drama involving the dead coming back to life.

NB - This video is not WYSO. We are much better than that!

Rhubarb Wine - Third Bottle (A3), 30th June 2013

Rhubarb was the natural choice tonight. We have spent the late afternoon and early evening at Amy and Darren's, installing their wedding present. This was a rhubarb cutting from Claire's grandmother's plant, in a large ceramic pot. Claire did the installing and I stood around in the kitchen drinking tea: a fair division of labour.

Amy had invited two other friends round - Rachel and Nick. Nick is also a homebrewer and brought along his elderflower cider. We each tried the other's and made (genuine) complimentary noises. Both drinks were delicious and it is a pity I was driving.

Between the six of us we ate vast quantities of cheese, potato and meat. Salad was there for decoration and we finished the evening with chocolate fudge cake and cream. I shan't be measuring my cholesterol any time soon.

Elderflower Wine 2013 - The Making Of ...

This is the latest I have ever started elderflower wine. It is the last day of June and elder trees are only just in abundant flower. As today threatened (and proved) to be a busy day, I ventured out to the nearby fields at around half past ten to pick elderflowers. I was probably only gone twenty minutes before returning with a bagfull. And this proved to be too many.

A Bag of Elderflowers

Earlier in the week I had experimented with freezing elderflowers to see if this would make stripping them any easier. It did, a little, but the flowers rapidly turned an unattractive brown, so I ditched that as an idea. Yesterday Julia recommended using scissors, and this is the method I chose, hoping it would make the process quicker. My hopes were realised - but barely. And by the end of my session collecting two pints of blossom I became increasingly cavalier about how much stem fell into the measuring jug. Life is sometimes too short to worry about these things.

I left the flowers for five hours while Claire and I went to Amy and Darren's to instal a rhubarb plant and eat our own body weight in cheese. On our return I put the flowers into my bucket and added five pounds of sugar, 12 pints of cold water, 2 litres of 'Grape & Peach Juice Drink' - I find it impossible to source unbuggered-about-with white grape juice -, two teaspoons of tannin, one teaspoon of pectolase and two each of crushed camden and vitamin B1 tablets. The camden tablets have a best before date of 2000. I added the yeast and two teaspoons of nutrient the following morning.

Apart from stirring the wine twice a day, I left it until Friday 5th July, at which point I sieved out the flowers, with the liquid going into its two demijohns. This was done while listening to a moving Radio 4 Play, Strike for a Kingdom, about poverty, class and murder in 1926 Wales. Learning my lesson from yesterday's gooseberry, I have left a little room between the liquid and the demijohn's neck to allow for excessive fermentation, and I have kept back some nascent wine for topping up.

I think I need to mow the lawn

If you want to see how this wine turned out, click here.

Gooseberry Wine 2013 - The Making Of ...

I arrived home last night, 28th June, to the message that Julia's whitecurrants were in urgent need of netting and the gooseberries were ready to be plucked. Now, I am particularly keen on preserving the whitecurrants as they will tick off another letter from my wine alphabet project, so I arrived at Julia's allotment at just after ten this morning. It was a fine day and after a quick inspection of her plot, including a brand new high-tech been hive and a plum tree laden with more fruit than it knows what to do with, I set to work on the gooseberry bush.

There were plenty of berries, but most were not yet ripe. I concentrated on the largest fruits and this involved practically crawling underneath the bush. Nearly twelve hours later my arms look as if I have been tormenting Aggie when she is in a ferocious mood. However, the scars are worth it. I came away with exactly six pounds of gooseberries and safe in the knowledge that the whitecurrants were securely netted.

At home I weighed and washed the fruit and intended to spend the afternoon picking elderflowers. Instead, I got otherwise distracted and decided the elderflowers could wait a day.

Washing the fruit

In the evening, after cooking a particularly delicious pork, cashew nut and lime stir-fry and bottling my blackberry wine, I sliced the gooseberries using the food processor. This was a much faster and less painful process than trying to crush them with a potato masher, which has been my method in previous years. I have added 3 lbs of sugar and 6 pints of boiling water. This is a simpler, quicker method than directed by C J J Berry and I suspect just as effective. I put the yeast and a teaspoon each of nutrient and pectolase into the mix the following morning.

I sieved the liquid into its demijohn on Thursday night, 4th July. It is an opaque phlegm-coloured mix, and I predict a relatively large sediment. I have filled the demijohn to its neck and this may prove to be a mistake.

The space between the liquid and the neck

 shows how much wine bubbled out

Christmas Tutti Fruti - Seventh Bottle (B6), 27th-28th June 2013

Claire writes: As a rare treat, I am in charge of the wine diary. I have had a week off work and this bottle has accompanied Thursday and Friday evenings. I have been callously abandoned on both of these evenings and have spent the time ALONE with this bottle and a couple of episodes of Precision presented by Marcus de Soutoy. Both wine and Precision are OK - neither more nor less. So there.

Ben writes:  I had three sips from this bottle, though Claire might describe them as gulps.

Gooseberry & Elderflower - First Bottle (B6), 25th-26th June 2013

Claire's Facebook Status Update currently reads: "The new batch of gooseberry and elderflower wine has a peculiar delayed-action nastiness. It looks stunning (golden, crystal clear and sparkling) and tastes perfectly innocuous for the first ten seconds. Then the full sweaty, mousey nastiness grabs you by the back of the tongue and whirls your tonsils around". Eight people, including three of my cousins, have 'Liked' this. We managed to finish it, though today, the day after, I have had a constant headache. Still, only another eleven bottles to go.

*

If you want to read how I made this wine, click here. The 2011 batch was delicious. I don't know what happened!.