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This blog is a record of the wine that I make and drink. Each flavour made and each bottle drunk will appear here. You may come to the conclusion that, on the whole, I should be drinking less.

Saturday, 7 November 2020

Halloween Wine - Fifth Bottle (1) 30th-31st October 2020

 A bottle of Halloween Wine on All Hallows' Eve, albeit opened a day early. The wine has a hint of chili taste and is a dry, fruity red. Mostly we drank it whilst watching television. On Friday it was Taskmaster which is silly and joyous and exactly right for these difficult times. I think snot bubbled from my nose at one point. Then on Halloween we finished the bottle watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show with the Snarkalong Film Club. It was a radical film for 1975 and has actually aged quite well. Tim Curry is just fabulous!

Wiggy on my lap, using wide angle lens


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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous7 November 2020 at 15:54

    Hi.
    I have been reading this blog quite a lot and wondering if I would be able to do this myself. Is there a basic method that you use? Thank you.

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    Replies
    1. Ben Hardy7 November 2020 at 16:51

      Hello!

      Thanks for getting in contact. Making wine is really easy and you would definitely be able to do it yourself. The most difficult thing is patience: because it generally takes about 6 months between starting the wine and drinking it.

      You do need some basic equipment: a bucket with a lid, a carboy (called demijohns in the UK, but I think you are American), some plastic tubing, a large wooden spoon, a potato masher.

      My basic recipe (and here I am simplifying, but many boil down to this) is 4 lbs fruit, mashed in a bucket. Pour in 6.5 UK pints of boiling water (so 130 fluid ounces in total - US pints are smaller) and three lbs of sugar. Stir it all round and leave over night. Add 1 teaspoon each of yeast, yeast nutrient and pectolase the next morning and stir once a day for 5 or 6 days. At the end of that, transfer the liquid (sieving out the fruit) into the demijohn, leaving a little bit of room at the top until fermentation has died down a little. Fix a rubber bung with an airlock (which is half filled with water). When fermentation has died down, fill the demijohn from either retained liquid or water. Wait for 2 months, and then siphon off the liquid from the dead yeast at the bottom into a new demijohn. Top up the gap with a mix of sugar and water (at a ratio of 4 oz sugar to 1 pint of water). Leave until 6 months after starting and then bottle.

      If you want to email me, feel free. I will leave my email address up for a day, and then take it down again tomorrow. It is ben14hardy@yahoo.co.uk .

      All the very best

      Ben

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  2. Anonymous7 November 2020 at 17:09

    Thank you for the response! I'm buying the equipment I don't have right now.

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