Rose Petal Wine - Twelfth Bottle (C5), 9th-10th November 2018

Friday nights are generally for staying home, opening a bottle of wine and catching up with the week gone by. This Friday, though, I was out playing wind octets in Wetherby and admiring badger skulls. Claire was left at home with a bottle of rose petal wine and I was pleased to see more than half of it left on my return. I made a good go at emptying it, but did not quite succeed.

I had remembered this batch of wine (2016's) to be poor, but this bottle was rather good.

Blackberry Wine - Third Bottle (B2), 8th November 2018

This really is an excellent bottle and I predict that it will win the Wine Party in just over a week's time. Thursday was our only night in together over the week so we celebrated with sausages and a bottle of blackberry wine. By the time the sausages (and mash, onion gravy and a squash stuffed with apple) were ready, the bottle was close to empty and we were both more than a little tiddly. This is shocking behaviour for a School Night, though Claire does not work Fridays, so she is excused.

Apple & Strawberry Wine - First Bottle (6), 2nd-3rd November 2018

I have mad a decent batch of wine. This bottle is light, and has a slight fizz and a beneficial sweetness to it. The flavour is clearly both apple and strawberry and it is really very drinkable. Attractive too - with a pink blush.

I opened it on Book Group night, where we were discussing The Bloody Chamber - a series of disturbing Fairy Tales written by Angela Carter. I loved it: her writing is exquisite and the tales are dark and inventive.

Claire and I finished the wine on Saturday to a splendid dish (cooked by me!) of Red Snapper in a Creole sauce. Just delicious.

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

Damson Wine - The Making Of...

Two years ago, Claire and I planted a damson tree sapling in the front garden. Where Claire had images of damson jam and damson gin, my thoughts were of wine. We both looked forward to branches weighed down by their fruit. So far it has produced not a single damson. Therefore, when Emma mentioned at work that her mother had been storing damsons in her freezer and I was welcome to have a bag, I indicated that I would be a glad recipient.

Our damson tree

On Thursday 1st November, Emma brought the damsons in and it was important that I turn them into wine that evening - defrosting fruit never lasts beyond a day. I was busy with wine-making duties anyway - racking my elderberry and putting apple wine into its demijohns.

3 lbs 2 oz damsons

On consulting four recipe books only one told me to de-stone the fruit, so I ignored that one. One told me to put chalk into the wine, another advised wheat or barley and a third talked about sultanas. This is my first time of making damson wine and advice is there to be ignored. So I went for the simplest option - using only damsons, sugar, water and yeast.

The recipe books I ignored

There were 3 lbs 2 oz damsons, which is a little under the 4 lbs advised by recipe books (to which I was paying no attention anyway) so I declared this sufficient and put them into my bucket. They mashed easily. I put in 1 lb of sugar and then found I had no more sugar in the house. (A further 1 lb 12 oz went in on Saturday morning.) This was covered by six and a half pints of boiling water, stirred and left over night to cool. I then put in 1 teaspoon each of yeast, nutrient, pectolase and citric acid.

The wine with the yeast having been sprinkled in

The wine went into its demijohn on Tuesday 6th November, even though I was out all evening playing quintets in Ilkley. This meant that I had to be organised, so I got everything ready to sterilise before I left for work that morning. On my return I took time only to feed the cats before setting to and covering all equipment with a sodium metabisulphite solution. Putting the wine into its demijohn took about half an hour and I now have my first ever batch of Damson Wine bubbling away.

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

Orange Wine - Sixth Bottle (A2), 31st October 2018

Warning. Tenuous Connection Alert.

One of the two colours associated with Halloween is Orange. On the basis that I don't have a 'Black Wine', I opened this bottle instead. We finished it in one sitting - never a great idea for a Wednesday night. Claire had sent me a text earlier in the day saying that it had been 'Bloody'. By this she meant that she had received an overwhelming number of blood samples to analyse and did not stop for 10 hours. Hence an entire bottle of Orange Wine whilst distributing sweets to neighbourhood children.

Elderberry Wine - Sixth Bottle (A1), 28th October 2018

After a Sunday playing octets, a lazy evening was in order. I warmed a bottle of elderberry wine by the stove and we drank it to cannelloni. The wine has now had a year to mature and is all the better for it. The rest of the evening was spent either watching an episode of Doctor Who about giant spiders (me) or hiding in the kitchen due to arachnophobia (Claire).

It wasn't this episode, or this Doctor

Apple Wine and Apple & Strawberry Wine 2018 - The Making Of...

Our apple tree

Autumn has settled into the year and has yet to give up her seat for Winter. Leaves have mostly fallen to the ground whereas apples mostly remain on the tree. Not entirely, however. I had a free Saturday on 27th October so decided to start both my Apple and my Apple & Strawberry wine that day. For each I needed 4 lbs apples. Finding 8 lbs of usable apples on the lawn was easy, though I rejected those that had been gnawed by squirrels or suggested that they hosted a whole community of invertebrates. In fact, for the pure Apple wine I denuded our crab apple tree of the 12 oz fruit it produced this year, therefore needing only 3 lbs 4 oz of windfall apples.

Out of the cold, I first of all put 1 lb of defrosting strawberries into the bucket for 'Apple and Strawberry' wine and gave this a good mashing. I then cut the apples into pieces, rejecting anything bruised or manky, and whizzed them through the food processor using the 'slice attachment'. Half went into the 'Apple' wine bucket and the other half went into the 'Apple and Strawberry' wine bucket. Next the 'Apple' wine bucket got a pound of minced sultanas (again using the food processor for mincing, but this time on the regular attachment).

Our crab apple tree

I added 3 lbs sugar and 6½ pints of boiling water to each bucket, giving them each a vigorous stir. On Sunday morning I added a teaspoon of yeast, of nutrient and of pectolase to each.

The fruit ingredients, gathered together

I then left the wine (stirring once each day) until Thursday 1st November, when I spend the entire evening doing things with wine (these two, elderberry and damson) whilst listening to old episodes of Desert Island Discs. I put each wine into its demijohn, removing much of the fruit with a colander before using the jug, sieve and funnel method. I had to squeeze the discarded fruit at the end of the process to retrieve enough liquid for the Apple wine.

The sliced apples

The Apple & Strawberry is an attractive dark pink. The Apple is an unattractive slime-brown. Both have a large yeasty foam head which I am hoping will not escape its demijohn.

If you want to see how the Apple Wine turned out, click here.

If you want to see how the Apple & Strawberry Wine turned out, click here.