Make Natural Wine
Making Wine Natures Way
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One of the things I am known for by friends, family and colleagues is my passion for making wines.
I discovered this latent passion back in 2004, when we, my partner and I decided it would be nice to have some mead to celebrate the wheel of the year with.
So I did my research and found a wonderful man called Richard who owned a little wine making shop in Cheam, UK called Cheers - http://www.cheerswinemakingandbrewing.co.uk/ - who was able to provide me with the tools and resources I needed to make mead. I found a recipe for Elderberry mead that sounded good and so, with my ingredients sourced, my tools sanitised, my kitchen in order, I set about my first foray into wine making.
I mixed water with honey, sourced from local bees, and elderberries from my own garden and stirred them all together and left this for a while. Together we put it into 3 demijohns equalling about 15litres of mead in total!
We waited and waited and we couldn’t see it change, we got worried, thought we had gone wrong somewhere with the process. Richard was receiving a lot of phone calls from us at this stage and eventually he got us to bring a taster bit down to him to try. He thought is was delicious and exactly the way REAL mead should taste (not sweet and saccharine like shop bought Meads). He tested it for alcohol levels and found that it was 18% proof.
We were amazed 
and very happy with this result and we now had a lovely mead for all our festivals.
After that there was no stopping me… I started to make wines every spring and autumn for the next few years… I have listed some of them below:
- Elderberry & Apple Wine
- Oak Leaf Wine
- Rosehip Wine
- Elderberry & Blackberry Wine
- Damson Port
- Gooseberry Wine
- Ginger Wine
- Blackcurrent Wine
I also had fun with spirits too and you would find me, every autumn, collecting sloes and damsons from the hedgerows to make sloe 
gin and damson gin and every summer picking raspberries from the local farm to make raspberry vodka (which I highly recommend).
If you would like to try any of these recipes, my new book – ‘Wine Making Natures Way’ – is now available online from www.makenaturalwine.com
A couple of years ago now I decided to take up a new challenge and was persuaded by Richard to go on a cider making weekend in beautiful Gloucestershire, at a wonderful place called Raglans Farm.
The setting was quite magnificent and as it was Autumn we were waking to lovely morning mists and golden, red leaves on the trees and the river Severn meadering in the distance. The weather was lovely the whole weekend and everybody was in the spirit (literally in some cases).
We awoke on the Saturday morning, having arrived the night before, to hear the local farmer backing his truck into the drive and a call went up ‘the apples are here’. We all went outside to see the most humungous pile of apples lying in the driveway waiting to be sorted.
Well as you can imagine, we had a lot of work to do to turn this lot into cider, so we started picking and dicing into buckets then we would take the apples and make up cheeses in the cider press and squeeze the juice out… that juice was so sweet, I can remember the flavour now and it still makes my mouth water.
We got over 200 litres of cider from that pile of apples and to top it off the next day some of us went pear scrumping in a local orchard, so that we could make peri peri, delicious
Now that I am in the land of Down Under it is the turn of the tropical fruits to have a go in my wines so I am starting simple with a lovely infusion of Strawberries into gin and then moving on in the new year to Mango Wine, which I am told is quite lovely!
My adventures into wine making just keep getting more and more exiting, why don’t you join me and try making some of your own
Enjoy!
Ali x