Blackcurrant & Raspberry Wine 2020 - Fourth Bottle (1), 14th November 2021

The Internet is a marvelous thing. It allows one to order Dim Sum to arrive through the post, complete with cardboard double-decker steamer and dipping sauces. This was Rachel's idea and we had a Zoom Dinner Party with her and Duncan, during which I opened this Blackcurrant & Raspberry Wine. Whilst a white wine might have been preferable, I had nothing chilled. The Dim Sum was fantastic - and my favourite was the pork bun. It all made for an entertaining evening.

An upside-down Mango cake made on 14th November

Gooseberry Wine 2020 - Fourth Bottle (2), 17th October 2021

Sunday night was our monthly Zoom Dinner Party with Rachel & Duncan, and that required a bottle of something decent. The menu was Prawn Curry and a dhal (dahl?), meaning the wine needed to be a sharp white. This describes gooseberry perfectly and neither the bottle nor the food disappointed. Again we had a lovely, boozy evening and once the Zoom call had ended Claire and I cut ourselves a slice of Gugelhupf (bless you!) I had made earlier in the day and watched The Crown.

The Gugelhupf

Elderberry Wine 2019 - First Bottle (B3), 4th September 2021

I left this vintage two years before opening the first bottle. As a consequence I have avoided a disappointing thin and metallic elderberry wine. This bottle was a fine elderberry: rich and dark, with a hint of real wine.

Duncan and Rachel are here: our first overnight visitors since the Before Times, and our house is tidy! We had a lovely evening which started with negronis and ended with bush tea. Then tomorrow we go to Aysgarth to begin a 52 mile walk round the Herriot Way. Wish us luck!

Taken on 5th September - at Aysgarth Church

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

Rose Petal 2014 - Final Bottle (B2), 10th September 2021

I opened this bottle, anticipating that I would have to pour it down the sink. Not a bit of it: the wine had matured nicely, whilst keeping its rose flavour. It had not developed that off-sherry taste that most of my wines acquire on age.

This bottle was drunk in celebration of having completed The Herriot Way, a 52-mile walk in the Dales over the previous 4 days with Rachel & Duncan. It had been a wonderful holiday and the wine was chosen specially for Rachel.

Duncan, Claire and Rachel - at the very end of 52 miles.

Elderberry Wine 2017 - Thirteenth Bottle (C1), 24th July 2021

It is not many bottles of wine that result in five people dancing to a mix of Abba and Tchaikovsky in the garden after dark. This was one such bottle. Actually, it was one of many that evening, but it was a glorious night. This was the first weekend since the Covid restrictions had been lifted and we spent it in Cambridge with Rachel & Duncan (Howard was our fifth). 

Earlier in the day we had helped out at a Food Hub, which was itself an interesting and enjoyable thing to do, but it is the evening that will stay with me. One of those magical times where my own universe is full of joy. The wine wasn't bad either.

Rachel at the Food Hub

Rose Petal & Orange Wine 2019 - Fifth Bottle (4), 11th July 2021

We had another virtual dinner party with Rachel & Duncan on Sunday night and this was our bottle of choice (after a small whisky smash). The food was a Turkish dish: Lemon & Apricot Cinnamon Chicken: so something involving rose petal for the wine was perfect. There was a more pronounced orange flavour than I had remembered, but that wasn't a bad thing. The meal was sumptuous - and easy to make. And then for pudding I produced a white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake.

White Chocolate & Raspberry Cheesecake

Crab Apple Wine 2020 - First Bottle (1), 16th May 2021

"Ointmenty". That is Claire's description of this wine. She doesn't think it unpleasant but feels it is a little medicinal in flavour. I, however, am really happy with it. This wine is sharper and more interesting that pure apple wine. It has a lovely golden colour to it and I delighted that after a five year gap, I am able to be self sufficient in crab apples for wine again.

We drank it on Sunday evening which was another Zoom dinner party courtesy of Padian Foods with Rachel & Duncan. This month it was Kapitan Chicken - excellent food at the hot end of spicy and it was a wonderful evening. Full of joy and laughter and, of course, Crab Apple Wine.

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

I also made a Rhubarb Meringue Pie

This is it before it was baked.

Blackcurrant & Raspberry Wine 2020 - Second Bottle, 11th-13th April 2021

Sunday was a day of many pleasures. The best of these was spending time in the garden of 60 Heworth Green, huddled around an outdoor stove chatting with Chris, Kate and my parents. It has been months since I have seen any of them and though we were there for only 90 minutes, it was glorious. We were snowed upon but that just made it all the more memorable.

In the evening we had another virtual dinner party with Rachel & Duncan, where this was our second bottle opened, after a bottle of Prosecco to celebrate Cornelia Gruntfuttock's birthday. The wine is excellent and I will save a bottle for Rachel & Duncan to taste when we eventually see them in person.

The snow came later

Ginger Wine 2020 - Second Bottle (2), 14th March 2021

The second Sunday in the month is now when we have a virtual dinner party with Rachel & Duncan. Our March menu was Prawn Khampel, supplied by Padian Foods. Zoom was switched on at 6 and we began cooking. Early on in the process I opened a bottle of ginger wine. The curry was superb - one of the best that we have had from Padian, and distinctly Thai. I also enjoyed the wine - a white wine with a jab of ginger and lemon, though Claire was less enthusiastic. It was a lovely evening, again - and it did not feel as if we were socially distanced by 150 miles.

A cake I made on 14th March (not a cow pat)

Xmas Tutti Fruti 2019 - Fourth Bottle (B6), 2nd-3rd March 2021

Another fine bottle of Xmas Tutti Fruti - a light red that is easy to drink. The only notable thing to happen either day is that we have booked a holiday. Perhaps a foolish thing to do in these uncertain times, but I am hopeful about this one. Admittedly it is, like my last three holidays, a walking holiday in Yorkshire. But this time it is the Herriot Way - a 50 mile circular walk over four days, staying in posh hotels each night. Rachel has organised it and my inner Yorkshireman is to be suppressed. Come September I will be ready to splash out on fancy accommodation and haute cuisine. 

Some abandoned headphones
encountered on a morning walk

Rhubarb, Elderflower & Mint Wine 2020 - First Bottle (6), 14th February 2021

Our Valentine's meal was sponsored by mint. Not only did we drink this bottle of wine, but we had gin & tonics with a mint garnish, Vietnamese Mint Chicken and Nigella's Vietnamese Salad, featuring mint. We must have had delightful breath after all of that.

The wine was excellent and I opened this vintage because Claire has been disparaging about the previous two years. It is zingy and light, and it is a shame that I have given a bottle to Liz!

Our Vietnamese Chicken was another Padian Food pack that we cooked along with Rachel & Duncan. (Who says Valentine's Day should be a romantic meal for two?) It was blistering hot but delicious - the correct level of sourness. Another lovely evening.

I also made cake - a nut meringue slice

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

Crab Apple Wine 2015 - Twenty-Ninth Bottle (E6), 31st January - 6 February 2021

Claire is of the opinion that this wine has deteriorated massively in quality and refused to drink any. I think that whilst it was not at its refreshing best, it was entirely fine so I drank the bottle over the course of the week, beginning with a Lockdown Dinner Party with Rachel & Duncan and finishing with an incomprehensible film version of Charlie's Angels. I suspect that my lack of comprehension was alcohol related.

Our garden on 2 February

Orange Wine 2019 - Fifth Bottle (3), 31st January - 2nd February 2021

Sunday night was another virtual dinner party with Rachel & Duncan, this time to celebrate Duncan's birthday. Our Zoom screens went on at 6, we drank our aperitifs and began cooking a Malaysian Chicken Curry from Padian Foods. Early on in the process I opened this orange wine, which was butter smooth and delicious. We had an excellent evening: over three hours of cooking, eating, drinking, conversation and laughter. Once this pandemic ends we will continue these virtual sessions.

I also made biscuits that day, and this is them in progress

Ginger Wine 2020 - First Bottle (3), 10th January 2021

Once again, ginger wine proves itself to be a suitable flavour to do every year. This is an excellent bottle of wine: it has both a strong ginger and citrus taste, and is dry enough to go with a proper meal. We drank this with Rachel & Duncan, insofar as one can in these days of Covid 19. Zoom is excellent for a long evening chat with just one other screen. We each cooked the same meal - a Malaysian chicken curry - and spent three hours plus chatting. It was a superb evening and felt nearly like we were in the same room. There are definite possibilities presented by Lockdown.

A photo I took on 10 January which 
tells a tragic tale.

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

Xmas Tutti Fruti 2018 - Seventh Bottle (A3), 25th July 2020

We drank this bottle on the start of a week's holiday. It should have been the Rydal Hall week, but Covid 19 has put a stop to that. Instead I will be holidaying in Yorkshire and today that involved a walk in the environs of Hovingham with Bridget and family. It was a delight to see them, and Gemma is getting towards the age that Bridget and I were when we first met at Youth Theatre Yorkshire.

In the evening we had a Zoom chat with Rachel & Duncan in which this bottle was opened and finished. Fruity and zingy, but not zingy enough to keep me awake through Mary Poppins.

Hovingham Hall plus cricket match

Rhubarb, Elderflower & Mint Wine 2020 - The Making Of...

It is with this wine that I say Adieu to my forties. They have mostly been very kind to me. At their start I was just finishing off my MA in Medieval Studies and now at their close I am in a job that I enjoy and I feel settled in my life. The decade has seen two redundancies, a published book, moving house, a dear friend dead, two new cats, a strange and frightening world order, two nephews and the current pandemic. Put like that, my forties sound far more traumatic than they, in fact, were. They have certainly not been uneventful. What better way to mark their close than (or, alternatively, as I had a free Saturday, how else should I spend it except by) making Rhubarb, Elderflower and Mint wine?

Our rhubarb is very much past its best, so I sent a message to Liz to find out if she had any spare. Happily she had plenty and brought round 2 lbs. I managed to get a further pound from our plants to obtain the 3 lbs required for the recipe.

About half the elderflowers came from the elder tree growing in the Synagogue hanging over our back fence; the rest came from trees on Bentcliffe Drive and the elder in Allerton Grange Field. Stripping these to get a pint of flowers was always going to be the dullest part of making this wine, but was enlivened by listening to Mark Steel's in Town on BBC Sounds.

Over the past few years my 'handful of mint' used in this wine has been getting larger and Claire thinks that this is to the wine's detriment. Therefore this year I have only picked a small handful - and mostly spearmint (rejecting those leaves with cuckoo spit on them).

I chopped the rhubarb into thin pieces and put this, the elderflowers and the chopped mint into my bucket with 3 lbs of sugar. I poured over 6½ pints of boiling water and left this overnight. On Sunday morning, 14th June (my 50th birthday), I put in a teaspoon of yeast, nutrient and pectolase.

I meant to put all this into its demijohn on Friday night, but instead had a Zoom meeting with Rachel and Duncan, where we drank a gin and tonic and then a bottle of (real) red wine. Doing anything productive after that was not going to happen. Instead, the wine went into its demijohn on Saturday morning, 20th June. It is a light pink and fermenting as it should.

The wine and Kato

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

Damson Wine - Third Bottle (5), 2nd January 2020

Rachel requested a bottle of damson wine specifically for New Year, and who am I to refuse? It is excellent and has vanilla overtones. We drank it after a day spent in Cambridge where we went to a zoological museum full of bones and animals preserved in jars, followed by dim sum at a Chinese restaurant which possibly got some of their ingredients from this museum.

We finished the damson wine before sitting down to eat salmon, where Richard & Wendy joined us. The May holiday has been organised - we are off to Shropshire this year, though it is possible that Richard & Wendy won't be able to make it. Richard is off to Alaska to climb USA's highest peak.*

My 2nd January photos have disappeared from

my phone - here is a 1st January one instead

* Oh, if only we had known. Obviously the holidays didn't happen.

Blackberry Wine 2018 - Third Bottle (B4), 9th-10th November 2019

This bottle is where I and the Wine Party disagree. I thought that this wine was disappointing - much less than blackberry wine can be. My guests voted it into second place, with an average score of Very Nearly 4. Mary was particularly effusive about it. She awarded it a 10 out of 5 (for scoring purposes I reduced this to 5.5) and christened it 'The Badgers'. Duncan, however, agreed with me, giving it a 2 and commenting on its thinness. I don't think that 2018 will go down as a classic Blackberry Year.

Rhubarb, Mint & Elderflower Wine 2018 - Third Bottle (6), 31st December 2019

As has been our practice for the last several years, we spent New Year's Eve in Cambridge with Rachel and Duncan. And continuing the tradition we had all gone to bed before midnight. This year I'm not sure that we made it up much past 10:30. It was a lovely evening, though, and this bottle of Rhubarb, Mint & Elderflower was one of the three drunk. Claire thinks that I need to dial back a little on the mint, to avoid any more of a mouth wash feel. I think that I have it about right.

Duncan, Claire and Rachel cooking on New Year's Eve

Blackberry Wine 2017 - Fourteenth Bottle (B3), 1st January 2020

Our first bottle of the decade - and a good one to welcome in the 2020s. This blackberry wine is so smooth and tastes so much like blackberries that I think it is one of my best vintages. As usual we were in Cambridge and had a short-ish walk round Hemingford Grey. Cambridgeshire looks like it abounds with multi-millionaires, judging by the size of many of the houses that we walked past.

I spent much of the day being anti-social reading Bad Blood - given to me by Duncan, about a fraudulent Silicon Valley start-up dealing with blood tests: it was fascinating and gripping and told a story of ego, lies and misplaced optimism.

This was on the walk we went on