What a strange time the first weekend in July turned out to be. We collected the keys to our new house on Saturday morning, 4th July and first inhabited the place where we are likely to spend the rest of our lives. The place is a wreck - not structurally, but there is a daunting amount to do before we can live there. Its back garden, though, is nearly a blank canvas and we spent much of the afternoon weeding and digging a small corner. There are problems with light, however, mostly caused by a mature sycamore outside our boundary. Claire came away near tears and with a severe case of Buyer's Remorse. Time will tell, and two days later, she is feeling far more positive.
One good thing is that the garden has strawberries. We picked the ripest one and it now forms part of this wine.
Back at home I gathered tiny wild strawberries fom our garden in the rain, hulled those we had got from Wharfedale Grange and put them all in the bucket, taking a potato masher to them. I added 3 lbs sugar and 4 pints of boiling water.
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| One strawberry from the new house, and tiny strawberries from our garden |
This evening, Monday 6th July, I separated the liquid from the pulp, putting the liquid in a demijohn and the pulp in a pan, and covered the pulp with 2 pints of cold water. This sat for the time it took me to eat and do the dishes (which was ages). I then put all liquid back into the freshly sterilised bucket, threw out the pulp and added the yeast and a teaspoon each of nutrient, pectolase and tannin.
I put the wine into its demijohn on Saturday morning, 11th July. I don't remember a strawberry wine as deep a ruby colour as this one.
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