Well, here we are again, a new post and a new look and what better way to start anew than to talk about wine. What a year it’s been for winemaking as we had an abundance of produce. We do love our wine making as it’s creating something new that you can play around with. We started with Elderflower Champagne, something we’d never made before. It just takes 2 flower heads, sugar, yeast and 3 weeks! It starts out tasting like fizzy pop, but if you leave it for a few months then wow, it really does taste like champagne ! Because of the nature of champagne, you must put it in a fizzy water/pop bottle, as the gas has to be released very gently !
The bottle on the right is water, the misshapen one on the left is Champagne ! You have to gently release the gas or something will go pop !!
The next wine we made was an old favourite of ours, Dandelion. We still have some left from last year and the ratio of sugar to yeast may be wrong but oh well, we have a nice Sherry, and it blows your socks off !
We then went on to black and red currants and the reason for the title of this post is because if you don’t chuck your pulp away, you can get a second brewing from it. From 4 pounds of currants you can get 2 gallons of wine by adding 1 pound of raisins and boiling water to the second pulp. If anyone is interested in the full recipe just let us know.
We did exactly the same for the blackberries and the elderberries and with using the pulp twice we managed to brew 14 gallons of wine ! The sound of all the demi’s plop plopping in the kitchen was amazing, it’s a wonder the dogs got any sleep at all! We did after drinking some of last years brew!
People seem to think that you have to have a constant temperature to brew wine but no, not really. We have a range that goes out at night and the wine all slows down but once the range is re lit, it all starts up again, as long as there’s a temperature of around 15c it will still brew.
After a month or two, and if the ‘blups’ have slowed down, you can rack the wine off so it doesn’t sit on the ‘must’ as this can affect the taste, and then after about 6 months the wine can be bottled. We still have a few bottles of apple wine from 2 years ago and age does make it better. But it’s so hard to sit and wait for all of this good stuff to mature, so we came up with an idea. As grapes make wine, why can’t we use grape juice? So we added some sugar and yeast to a supermarket grape juice
We heated up the grape juice to dissolve the sugar and added the yeast once cooled.
Because we’d run out of demi’s we had to improvise by using 2 x 5 litre water bottles and drilling a hole in the lids and inserting a rubber grommet ( that I got from the motor factor’s) for the air locks to fit.
There’s no sediment to rack off and it’s ready in 4 weeks ! And it works, we’ve just enjoyed our first bottle and it’s as good as any inexpensive wine from the supermarket ! Wait until we try the tropical fruit one !!
This was just an experiment to see if it was possible, but that’s the sort of thing we do here at ‘The Willows’ we try, we experiment, we see what works. It’s the only way.
Anyway, happy brewing and let us know what you think.
Enjoy. ‘The Willows’
willowarchway 
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