Wine making

Even though we have made wine for the last two years, we were foolish enough not to keep the recipes. So we can't share the secrets to the delicious wines so far, but we're doing better at record-keeping and we'll post recipes as the current wines mature...

Until then, we thought it would be nice to write a step-by-step intro to our wine making.

Step 1. This involves being out and about finding the ingredients. So far, we have only made wine and other brews out of foraged (free) ingredients. These include blackberries, sloeberries, elderberries, rosehips, nettles, quince, and elderflower. Here's us collecting nettles recently (thank you, Ann-Marie for the dignified photo!)

Step 2. Next, we select and wash the fruit. Then mix them up with hot water, sugar, and yeast and leave them in a bucket for a few days to start the fermentation process. Below are the fruit for one of the blackberry and elderberry wines from 2010.

 Step 3. After that, the juice strained from the bucket goes into demijohns (large 10 litre glass containers). 

Step 4.  It stays in demijohns until in stops fermenting (and it may be transferred between demijohns a few times to get rid of the sediments), at which point it is transfered into bottles.    

Step 5. Bottles get labelled. 

 Step 6. Wait 2 years... and drink it!