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. Some of the wines I would like to share with you all…
Gwin Eirin Duon /Damson Port
This wonderfully rich and luscious port recipe originally comes from the valleys of Wales and would have warmed the blood of many a miner on the cold winter nights. It is a recipe with great versatility and flavour, which is never the same from one year to year as this wine varies as much as the fruit that goes into it, for if you get a juicy crop of damsons you will get a fuller port flavour from the wine but if the crop is less juicy then your wine will be more of a claret in texture and taste. Both are wonderful flavours and this wine works well with any social occasion.
and…
Oak Leaf Wine
This lovely smooth, woody wine has the flavours of the English countryside dissolving on your tongue with every mouthful. Dry in flavour and scent it appeals to the more savoury toothed among us. This is a wine to be savoured on the palette and is a very good accompaniment to fish and white meats.
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 gin and damson gin and every summer picking raspberries from the local farm to make raspberry vodka (which I highly recommend).
Raspberry Cordial
This delightfully fruity raspberry infusion just bursts with flavour in your mouth, tantalizing the senses, making you want more. This drink is perfect as after dinner liqueur, sitting in front of a roaring fire or just enjoying the company of friends and loved ones.
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, which is beautiful to drink but I do NOT recommend eating the strawberries!
“If you would like to try any of these recipes, my new E-book - ’Wine Making Natures Way’ – is now available just contact me to find out how to get your copy and start wine making today!”
“I would like to dedicate this book to Mother Nature, and the great and marvellous bounty she brings us all, and raise a glass to the Trees,
Roots and Fruits of the countryside, that throughout the seasons, continually bring us pleasure!”
I have now also made a lovely passion fruit wine, which is brewing away nicely and will hopefully be ready for consumption by Christmas. Look out for the recipe here soon.
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
