Supping with the Devil's Wee

I was hoping to let the matter of Blackberry Wine die quietly away, but dear friend J, who reads this blog, came to lunch the other day and enquired after it. As a matter of fact I had just finished labelling the final bottle.

The labelling was fun, but putting on the foil caps even better. You just plunge them into boiling water for a second and they shrink-wrap on, looking most impressive.

The wine has been christened ‘Devil’s Wee’ after the country tradition http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/brim_ble.htm that the Devil urinates on blackberries after a certain date, rendering them inedible. It’s also coincidentally no bad description of the contents; the labels are rather better than the actual wine.

I poured J a glass. Devil’s Wee has a pleasant, blackberry bouquet and an interestingly cloudy appearance. I detected faint hints of strawberry: J detected hints of methyl alcohol.

Methyl alcohol, J explained, is ‘bad’ alcohol as opposed to ‘good’ ethyl alcohol. Methyl or ‘wood’ alcohol is the stuff that makes you go blind.

J, who is a real countrywoman as well as a talented artist, knows a lot about home made wine. I sipped manfully at my glass of Devil’s Wee as she described the wines her sister makes, a marvellous delicate elderflower and a rich port-like elderberry. Her mother, apparently, also made a whole range of the most exquisite wines.

Ah, but blackberry wine is notoriously tricky, I pointed out weakly.

But no - J’s mother made excellent blackberry wine. In fact, virtually everyone J has ever come across seems to be an accomplished winemaker. Except, obviously, me.

J cautiously left her glass of methyl alcohol alone, sticking firmly to mineral water throughout lunch.

After she left, I checked up on methyl alcohol from a number of sites including the excellent http://www.drinksplanet.com/ (which I wish I’d found earlier) and I think I’m safe. The unanimous view is that you can’t get methyl alcohol poisoning from home-made wine. Some say it can’t be produced by grain or grape fermentation, others that all wines (and even jams) contain insignificant traces.

So that’s okay. I shall go on drinking Devil’s Wee.

Better stop blogging now; the room is going strangely dark and hazy…

The Propulsion of Mangel-Wurzels.

I didn’t quite realise that mangel-wurzels actually exist – I thought they were the stuff of rural legend and comic song, like cordwanglers. But I found this root lying on a farm track and pocketed it (I have large pockets) for further identification.

I’d assumed this rather sorry specimen of a beet had fallen off the back of a lorry, but having check out the superb and highly informative http://www.mangoldhurling.co.uk/index.html I think I must have stumbled into the aftermath of a sporting event. Whoever chucked this one at the Norman clearly missed the mark.

Do please check out this website – the Rules alone are an absolute must-read for any vegetable-throwing enthusiast.

The First Turkey of Winter

I've just seen the first turkey of winter. Bathed in early Autumn sunlight, he was poking his head through a farm gate, looking hopeful.

Christmas lights are already up (though not lit) in Stratford upon Avon. Sainsbury's has been selling Xmas Puddings for a month or more.

Fella, your days are definitely numbered...

Donald - The Last Potato

In which we meet, greet and eat Donald

Well, the potato crop is not seeing us as far through the winter as I’d hoped – here we are in October and scrapping the bottom of the bag.

I got nearly half a sack (okay - a quarter) of potatoes from my initial investment of 11 tubers. There were additional costs, of course. I had to bribe Number 1 Son with £10 to dig over the potato patch, after I’d wrecked my shoulder trying. Then, when I caught him trying to subcontract the work to Number 2 Son for 50p, I spent another £2 employing Number 2 Son to shovel manure.

All the same, I feel I got a decent return.

Potatoes are funny things. They have to be ‘earthed up’ – the earth piled higher and higher around the plants as they grow - so that the tubers are not exposed to air. Otherwise, they turn green and are apparently toxic. This figures, as they are actually part of the nightshade family.

Which of course invites the question – Why did people persist in cultivating such obviously poisonous plants? And how many people died eating green potatoes before someone invented ‘earthing up’? It’s like the fact that rhubarb stalks are edible, but rhubarb leaves very definitely aren’t. How many hungry souls succumbed to rhubarb poisoning working that one out?

I earthed up like mad, and all my potatoes were snowy white. And (I might have mentioned this before – it’s had a big impact on my life) I won 3rd Prize for Whites at the local Horticultural Show (don’t ask how many entries there were… lets just say Under Four).

I found Donald whilst selecting my entries. Show potatoes have to be identical in size and shape. Donald was a clear one-off: an exact and perfect replica of a bathduck.

So we’ve kept him till the very last. And now he’s had his chips. Or rather we have. Ha ha.

Incidental: Ever-Decreasing Crop Circles

So what actually happens to all the crop-circle makers once the crops have been harvested and there’s nothing left to flatten? Do they hibernate, like hedgehogs, or do they take up their planks and ropes and globe-trot like surfers, chasing the endless summer and that perfect rolling wave of wheat?

Or maybe they have a second trade, like sweeping chimneys. I’ve thought of several suitable rural trades they could turn their hands to this winter, all of which are seriously undersubscribed. I’m sure you can think of plenty more – please let me know your thoughts.

Guerrilla Funerals

These days, more and more people want to be buried in remote, romantic eco-friendly locations. Crack teams of guerrilla crop-circle makers moving at dead of night could surreptitiously bury YOU in the rural setting of your choice – from arable land to National Trust gardens or scenic cliff-top paths. There’s no red tape, no funeral directors to pay, and by the time you’re discovered you’re already decomposing.

Communicating with the Dead

Rural Churches are suffering funding crises, but they possess many valuable assets which remain under-exploited. Why not follow the lead of farmers with land adjoining motorways, and help sell the backs of tombstones as local advertising space?

Graffiti in Motion

Follow in the footsteps of Banksy – graffiti a cow. Cows are large, slow moving and grow a thicker pelt in winter. Using sheep shearing equipment or even a powerful electric shaver, it should be simple enough to carve elaborate crop circle designs into the rumps of cattle. A book of the results, artistically photographed would make an excellent Christmas stocking filler. You may also be eligible for Arts Council funding.

Cleaning up at the Mop

Now is the season of the Mop Fair. Labourers, the harvest brought home, would traditionally assemble for hire in the town square, each holding the implement of his or her trade (mopping being a popular one, clearly). No doubt a certain amount of morris dancing and accordion playing was laid on to make the whole thing go with a swing.

Nowadays, the Mop is an occasion for the youth of the local community to a ride on neon-lit mechanical monsters covered in garish portraits of Kylie and Elvis and churning out electro-pop at £2 – £10 a shot, or to compete for outsize pink plush teddy bears clutching red satin hearts by throwing balls at soldered stacks of tins.

The traditional Mop Fair treated labourers like commodities to be exploited. The modern Mop Fair treats young people like commodities to be ripped off. Plus ca change and all that…..

In Which We Fancy Poultry

Shottery Memorial Hall sounded a surprisingly modest venue for The National Poultry Show, and the signage was similarly low key. It comprised a home-made A4 poster on the gatepost, and an open fire exit door. The only signs of life were a handful of cars and a lady smoking a cigarette outside the fire exit.

I walked once round the building in search of an entrance, them gave up and consulted the lady at the fire exit.

‘You just go in’ she said nodding at the passageway behind her.

At the end of the passageway was a largish hall, its entrance more or less guarded by a seedy looking character with a book of raffle tickets. He seemed faintly surprised when I asked the entrance fee, and we settled on a modest 50p. He didn’t try to sell me a raffle ticket, and I helped myself to a photocopied list of exhibits.

The hall was stuffed with small square metal cages, stacked 3 high back to back in rows, all full of chickens. There must have been a good 400 of them, and as at any moment in time around 10 per cent were actively squawking or crowing, the noise was impressive.

Most of the serious business had clearly already taken place. Prize certificates were threaded into the fronts of many cages, and on the stage in the end of the hall sat a sad looking man behind a bottle of sherry and some gift-wrapped parcels (presumably the prizes) and five much larger cages containing the overall winners, the big-name stars of the show.

You know, I don’t think this could have been the actual National Poultry Show. I think it must have been a regional, or even local, offshoot of the main event. Apart from anything else, Prince Charles is the patron of the Poultry Club of Great Britain, and there was no sign of him at all.

And I would have spotted him easily – there were only a couple of dozen people in the hall, out of all proportion to the number of chickens, even allowing for multiple ownership. Presumably the vast majority had sneaked off to the nearby town for a spot of lunch and sightseeing, leaving their poultry to fend for itself. There was a ruddy cheeked man in a white coat and flat cap and a clipboard walking about, presumably the invigilator. Flat caps, ruddy cheeks, knobbly walking sticks and loden green jackets were indeed much in evidence, reflecting the healthy outdoor life of the chicken breeder. Also straining paunches, reflecting its comparatively sedentary nature and proximity to the local pub, and a curious range of frayed shorts and track suit bottoms, reflecting a sad want of fashion sense all round. The women were generally better dressed, and most had the air of being there out of necessity rather than passion, perhaps to help with the teas.

I had been hoping for something a little more commercial and upbeat, I must admit. I had been looking forward to stall selling poultry shampoo and grooming kits for show birds, and other things I could snigger at. But, in all fairness, there was no shortage of chickens.

In fact I was dazzled and confused, hardly knowing where to turn. For a happy hour I stalked the corridors of cages, consulting my exhibitor list and getting my eye in. I tried to convince myself that I could tell the difference between the first prize winner and the unplaced. I couldn’t. They were all beautiful. My favorites were the Wyandottes with their wonderful black or gold deckle-edged feathers, like Huguenot lace, and the Sussex. As a light Light Sussex farmer myself (well I own one) I felt more in my depth here; the striking difference in the award winners and my own specimen was they were sparking white and clean (tip – never get a white hen – unlike cats, they’re not into washing) and the ruffs around their necks were very deep and black, each feather delineated as though with Indian ink. There were a handful of fascinating rare breeds too, including this wonderful character, a split comb Cruella De Ville with black and white spotted feathers and a deep white collar.

The Bantams, which I had imagined merely toy birds for dilettantes, also fascinated me. The Modern Game bantams (category Hard Feather – don’t ask me why), tiny wiry brown creatures like pumped up starlings on steroids, with spindly legs and disproportionally broad pectorals, were deliciously feisty – just like their boxing namesakes. There was also a bantam category risquély named ‘A cock and two hens’ comprising a small huffy-looking family unit trying to get on with it’s life and ignore the audience.

Bantam fanciers seemed to be a class on their own. Clusters of shaven headed youths bigged up their birds to one another, a procedure which seemed to involve turning the birds upside down and peering up their rear ends. A pretty unhealthy activity, I felt, for young men who could be spending their Saturdays in the healthy outdoors, swigging cider in the doorway of Primark.

There was also an exhibition of eggs, chiefly of interest because almost all the ‘single bantam eggs’, already judged, had been removed, leaving only an indentation in the sawdust on each paper plate. What sort of person, I wondered, takes his bantam egg home early before it gets over-tired, but not his birds?

My bet for Best in Show was a massive, opulently feathered Sussex Cock with lusty red wattles and a rich baritone crow of toe-curling sexiness – I would have loved to have taken him home to my two. He came second, however, to an undistinguished-looking (to me) little brown bantam with a chest almost as wide as she was tall. Maybe you have to look up her fundament to appreciate her winning qualities.

If you can’t wait a whole year to attend the next National Poulty Show yourself, check out Stephen Armytage’s superb and amazing ‘Extraordinary Chickens’ – no guest cloakroom should be without it.

Fungal Feeding

You know, I simply can’t keep up with the harvest just at this point. No sooner have I brought home the nut crop, than the mushroom season is upon me. Imagine how busy I would be if I’d actually grown anything on purpose. I can’t think the larger-scale food producers cope.

I harvested the first crop of mushrooms this morning, when I was hanging out the washing It’s the first time I’d noticed them, though judging from the size of some, they must have been there for a while. It has been very dry lately, but finally rained few days back (I was so relieved, the drought was playing havoc with the late radishes) and that must have brought them out in a rush.

When I first saw these mushrooms, two years ago, I turned for advice to my trusty copy of Richard Mabey’s ‘Food for Free’. Richard Mabey is my guru and this little book is largely responsible for converting me from a callous city slicker to the dedicated daughter of the soil I have now become. You really must get yourself a copy.

‘There are 3000 species of large-bodied fungi growing in the British Isles, yet only twenty-odd of these are seriously poisonous’ says Mabey. That’s odds of 150:1, even if you ate fungi at random with your eyes bandaged.

One of the twenty-odd turned up in my first proper garden, in Kent. It wasn’t really a garden, more of a landslide – eighty or so feet of mud, trees and brambles rising up behind the house at around 60 degrees from the horizontal. I didn’t walk to end of the garden: I mountaineered.

I was very busy earning a semi-honest crust in one of those lucrative but dubious industries you don’t admit to at dinner parties (not estate agency, obviously, or I wouldn’t have bought such a daft house) and so I didn’t take much interest in the garden. But as the months passed, I noticed from my window a spot of colour amongst the damp vegetation. Grabbing a handful of crampons, I clambered up, to find two of the most perfect scarlet toadstools. They were absolute beauties, big enough to shelter a fair sized gnome, let alone seat a toad, and I was pleased as punch with them. Thanks to Richard Mabey, I now think they must have been Fly Agaric ‘very common in birch and pine woods’. They are of course toxic, but you’d have to be insane or suicidal to try eating anything that evil-looking.

Richard Mabey set me off on the mushroom trail.

Having first moved to the country, I found in the local woods in winter a quantity of Velvet Shank, also known (not by Mabey, I hasten to add) by the revoltingly anti-semitic name of ‘Jew’s Ears’. They don’t actually taste a great deal, and are fairly tough, but they are definitely edible. Mabey suggests you add them towards the end of stews where ‘….they will float on the surface like fungal water lilies’. I prefer to add them, chopped, at the beginning; well disguised from guests nervous of eating of fungi that don’t come from Tesco.

A year or two later I was walking on a wet autumn day around the grounds of a National Trust property, killing time before a meeting. Suddenly before me was a really magnificent giant puffball. I didn’t need Richard Mabey in my briefcase for this one. I’d read the Fay Weldon story, and I’d been hoping to find a decent puffball for ages. But the whole point about them seems to be that they pop up quite unpredictably. As this one had.

I checked around, but there was no-one in sight. Swiftly, I detached the puffball, opened my briefcase, and squeezed it in amongst the paperwork. Back home, only slightly bruised (the puffball, not me), sliced, fried in butter and olive oil, sprinkled lavishly with sea salt and black pepper and eaten all on its own, it made a truly sumptuous meal.

I first spotted my very own garden mushrooms two years ago and, working on the principal that they were probably Ceps, I ate them. Not all at once, though. Following tried and tested methodology, I ate a small piece on day 1, half a mushroom on day 2, a whole one on day 3, and, when I still wasn’t dead on day 4, a large plate of them, fried, on toast.

Looking again this year, I can see that they are clearly not members of the boletus family, as they don’t have the distinctive spongy gills. So I’ve no idea what they are, but I shall keep eating them anyway. If you can identify these mushrooms from the photos, please let me know. And if they are one of the poisonous varieties, please do so as swiftly as possible. Thanks!

In which we go gathering nuts in October

Why would anyone gather nuts in May? It’s entirely the wrong time of year. The reference may of course be to may trees, but then they don’t have nuts. More probably ‘gathering nuts in May’ is a quaint old country term for being off one’s rocker, a bit nuts in fact, and the nursery rhyme is, like so many, rather less dainty and more sinister than at first appears.

I started trying to gather nuts in August, to win a head start over the squirrels. I had looked up cobnut harvesting online, and read somewhere the jokey little sentence ‘but you have to be quick, before the squirrels get there first!’

It was the ‘!’ that really got to me, I think. Slugs eat my lettuces, caterpillars eat my tomato plants and everything eats my raspberries. Now even the bl**dy squirrels were getting in on the act.

I had read that nuts could be harvested from August to September. I was going away at the end of August, which would give the squirrels a clear window of opportunity. So I had to get in first. I mounted my campaign, Operation Nut, in mid-August.

I should explain that my hazel grove is not extensive. It comprises a single tree by the front lawn, stretching spindly branches a good fifteen feet upward. The central trunk is not really a trunk at all, but a cluster of them, all fairly slender and unclimbable (unless you are a squirrel, of course) after the first couple of feet.

So how to get the nuts down from the tree? For I could see that there were nuts, unlike last year when there there seemed to be nothing at all, for which I blamed the squirrels. Looking carefully, I could make out a number pale green clusters amongst the foliage of the upper branches. But how to get at them?

Shaking didn’t get me far – the branches, though too slender to climb, proved far too sturdy to shake. So I tried dislodging the nuts by throwing things at them. Unfortunately, I’m a pretty bad thrower, and 15 foot vertically is a surprisingly long way to throw anything heavy enough to dislodge a nut. Stones were too small, a half-brick too heavy, and a chunk of wood to cumbersome. Most of my throws fell short, and I nearly brained myself with the half-brick.

Then I remembered the catapult. Not one of those wimpy jock-strap resembling wash-leather slingshots as wielded by David against Goliath, but a serious piece of kit with a metal wrist guard and a thick rubber sling. It takes quite a lot of muscle tooperate, but shoots a long way. And probably, when used by an expert, it is pretty accurate. Not, alas, when used by me. Trying to hit a nut at 15 yards is not easy. I succeeded once, and the r*ddy thing must have been welded to the tree; it didn’t budge.

I was getting exasperated. Suppose I was on a desert island with only this tree for sustenance. Would I starve to death just because I lacked the skill, stamina and ingenuity to detach a nut? It seemed ridiculous to be defeated by such a simple challenge.


Then I had A Good Idea. I slung some string over one of the main branches (this in itself took twenty minutes and involved clambering about, getting poked in the eye with twigs). I tied the string into a loop, with a circumference of around 20 feet, and by pulling hard on it, made the branch sway and dance about like a sapling in a hurricane.

The nuts, however, stayed put.

So I gave up, and left the squirrels to it.

But by late September the nuts were still on the tree (as was my string – I tugged at it from time to time, to no effect) and the squirrels were clearly taking their time. Then one day I noticed a solitary nut lying on the driveway. Poking about the lawn, I found half a dozen more.

And so it went on, day after day, for a month and more. Every day half a dozen nuts appeared on the ground, and my only task was to spot them (not easy, they are well camouflaged against leaf litter) and rescue those on the driveway before they got run over.

I now have a large bowl of home bred cobnuts which we are keeping for Christmas.

I also have another, smaller bowl of some very beautiful nuts indeed.

These handsome fellows were gleaned, or scrounged, not from the rural hedgerows but from the Shifley Park housing development.

The development, and hence the saplings that the council no doubt forced the developers to plant along the pedestrian walkways, is about 10 years old. Planting includes a number of hazel trees, I did a spot-check on these in passing.

They are scrubby little bushes compared to my towering specimen, but they have catkins on them already (mine doesn’t) and one of them, mysteriously, seems to produce a very different and vastly superior looking nut. The inhabitants of Shifley Park, not being of a rural turn of mind, have clearly failed to spot the potential of this plantation as anything other than a handy dog toilet. So by picking my way amongst the furry grey decaying turds, I managed to collect a whole carrier bag full of these little beauties.

As you can see in the photo, the suburban nut on the right is massively larger and rounder than its rural counterpart. However, both kernels are about the same size. I think this must be because the larger nuts are older (I collected them from the ground, and don’t know how long they had been there) so the kernels may have had time to dry out and become wizened, like so many of us.

But the home-grown cobnut kernel definitely wins hands down on flavour. To be fair, I’ll have do to a taste test at Christmas when both have matured but, for now, I reckon the Cottage variety wins hands down. Thank goodness for that – I don’t think I could have borne the shame.

I believe there are many varieties of cobnut, and would love to hear from you if you know which variety either of these is. Or perhaps we should both just get a life.

In which we give a little wine....

It’s worked! I don’t believe it – I think it’s actually worked! Ladies and Gentlemen, I think I may actually be making home made blackberry wine. Well b*gg*r me.

On Wednesday, Dermot the Techie came to the house to remove all the lovely kit that the company had installed here almost three years ago when I started working for them. My hunky PC (two screens, massive RAM, goes like a Lambourghini when I’m on a roll) my business phones complete with fancy headsets, my printer (he’s welcome to that one – bloody thing drives me insane maundering on about its cartridges when I’m trying to get on with something) and even my lovely spare hard drive. But first of all he wanted to see the chooks. He knew about my pair, and was thinking of getting a few himself.

Smarting from his mission to strip me of my professional assets and reduce me to a single laptop and broadband that I actually have to pay for, I marched him out the back for a quick teach-in on Chickens and Why Not to Have Them.

He caught on as soon as he stepped out of the kitchen door, of course. Whilst he was scraping the excrement off his loafer, I explained that what comes out of the end of a chicken per diem, or out of ours, anyway, is one egg max and an absolutely astonishing quantity of guano, out of all proportion to the egg, the chicken, or indeed in my case the back terrace. The chooks spend a sizable portion of their day hanging around outside the kitchen door, pecking at the window in the hope of stimulating me into providing food, and crapping for England. As a result, step outside and you walk straight into a midden.

So it only took a brief inspection of the lawn, the vegetable patches and other devastated areas for Dermot to decide against chickens. But somehow the subject got around to wine-making, and here he turned out to be an old hand.

Dermot spent years, apparently, churning out gallons of Chateau Dermot from a second floor flat in Banbury. It had, he explained, a south facing balcony with sliding glass doors. The demi-johns ranged in the sunlit warmth behind the glass, where they bubbled away merrily like something out of Harry Potter. The results were, he said, spectacular. He also made rum out of marrows. You fill the marrows with brown sugar then hang them in the window to drip. That’s it, no yeast sachets or Campden tablets, just a marrow, some sugar and the sun – how idyllic. Sounds improbable to me,but there we go, and he said it was absolutely delicious. I wonder why he stopped doing it? Maybe his wife objected to window decorations of decomposing marrow. Women can be funny like that. We both realised, incidentally, that we had no idea what Jamaican, as opposed to Banbury, Rum is actually made of (apart from sugar, or course). So I have looked it up for you.

Anyway, a bloke who can make rum by dangling a marrow clearly knows a bit about homemade hooch, so I took him to visit the my own distillery, comprising around 25 pints of purple liquid in a plastic bottle.

I’m not committing myself, you see to the nature of the liquid. At that point, I was fairly confident it wasn’t wine, or even prospective wine. I reckoned it was sugared blackberry juice. And Dermot’s talk of ‘bubbling away merrily’ seemed to confirm my very worst fears. The recipe I had been following (about which much more below) described the pleasure of listening to the happy plops and gurgles as the fermentation gases make their way out of the airlock My airlock was totally bloody silent. I’d checked the seal, checked that I’d got the water level right, tried sneaking up on it and listening when it didn’t know I was there, like an anxious mother with a sleeping babe, but…nothing. Things were not looking good.

I blamed the equipment (when in doubt, blame the equipment). Thanks to the wonders of eBay and my lousy knowledge of geography, I had driven about 50 miles to acquire a garage full of second hand wine making kit, including 52 wine bottles (alas, empty) some big plastic buckets and a large cardboard box full of an astonishing range of unidentified ‘stuff’. There were several rubber bungs with airlocks poking out of them, but my eye was caught by one spectacularly high-tech version which had what looked like a tiny emersion heater wired into it. Just dangle the heater in the liquid, bung in the bung, plug the whole lot in and … bingo!

I hesitated at first. There was no thermostat on the thing, so how would I set it to the right temperature? Then it dawned on me that (a) if it was designed for winemaking, it would be preset to the right temperature and (b) its not as though I knew what the right temperature was anyway. A more pressing problem was that there is no electrical socket in the airing cupboard, selected, as I do not have a south facing balcony, as the warmest place in the house for my wine to live

Ah, but with the emersion heater working, it would not need to sit in the warmest place in the house, I could carry it down to the utility room, where the 52 bottles and the cardboard box were already sitting, and plug it in there.

So I hauled my 25 pints of blackberry juice downstairs. This saddened me, as I had been rather proud of the practicality with which I had made up the bottle upstairs, so that I would not have to carry up a heavy container and risk it collapsing on the stairs and wrecking the carpets. The questionable hygiene involved in perching the thing on the bathroom toilet whilst working, hardly in the spirit of the great Premier Crus, seemed a small price to pay. Now I had to drag the wretched object all the way through the house.

But I got there, lowered and plugged in the emersion heater, taped down the socket switch so that nobody could interfere with it, and waited for the Miracle at Cana to do a rerun.

So here Dermot and I were, eight days later, standing in a chilly utility room staring down onto the passive, opaque surface of was pretty certainly a whole lot of cold, stagnant blackberry juice. The tiny emersion heater glowed hopefully as we raised it from the depths, but it had evidently been inadequate to the task.

‘No, that’s had it’ said Dermot smugly. And I was not surprised.

However, as a mother will cling pitifully to the tiny corpse of her dead baby, I could not bear to acknowledge the death of my hopes and the waste of all those blackberries. Against any logic, I dragged the dead weight back up the stairs and into the reviving warmth of the airing cupboard. Tenderly I swaddled the demijohn in fleecy towels and old blankets. The warmth it lacked in life, I would give it in death. I decided to allow it 24 hours to revive spontaneously, after which I would creep out at dead of night and pour it down the drain. No-one need ever know.

The next morning showed no signs of life. I adjusted its swaddling clothes and decided to see if there was any winemaking advice online that could help me.

In the study, my decimated desk yawned back at me. I had forgotten the reason why Dermot came in the first place. There was no online.

Undaunted, I set off for my nearest public library. I would return to the technologies of the ancients. I would look it up in a book.

There were books on how to drink wine in the library (apparently there are those who can’t do it uninstructed) and books on how to mix cocktails. But nothing on how to make wine. A check on in the online catalogue showed that all the books were on loan, presumably to people like me with an airing cupboard full of blackberry juice. However, this in itself brought a relevation – you can go surf for free in libraries, for a whole half-hour. It had already crossed my mind that I could seek out an internet café, but I’ve always muddled them up with Cannibis cafes in Amsterdam and anyway I get baffled by the complexities of ordering in Starbucks, so the whole thing seemed pretty scary. But this is easy – you just need your library card. You don’t even have to buy a coffee.

In five minutes I had keyed in ‘stuck fermentation’ and got all the advice I needed. Depending upon where you are stuck, at any point between 1000 and 1080, you can either add more yeast, add a special re-start yeast, or creep out at dead of night etc etc.

Victorious, I returned home to the cardboard box to find something to measure my blackberry juice with. There was a very small box labelled, curiously, ‘vino-o-meter’. Perfect. It was a fragile glass object wrapped tenderly in tissue paper and, sadly, it only wenjt up to 25. If only I had bothered to find what I should have 1080 of.

Instead, I made a pragmatic decision to add more yeast and give it yet another 24 hours.

I made up the yeast, took it up to the airing cupboard, opened the door and … ‘plop…(gurgle)…’

Had my ears deceived me? Had the stress of it all finally got to me? Or were there actually signs of life in that thur demijohn? I closed the door, lurked outside for a bit, opened it again and …surely that was another faint ‘plop’?

I swaddled the demijohn yet closer, closed the door tenderly, crept down stairs and emptied the yeast down the sink.

From time to time during the day I stood listening at the airing cupboard for further signs of life. Not a sound. I had hope now, but it was again fading fast. And I had no more yeast.

That was yesterday. This morning I woke and immediately checked on the demijohn. Nothing. I had an idea. I fetched a breakfast cup, turned the little tap at the base of the demijohn, and poured myself a dribble of cloudy dark pink liquid. And sipped

Reader, it nearly blew my head off. It certainly wasn’t blackberry juice, and it wasn’t exactly paintstripper either. It was, in fact, rather thin, very sour but almost definitely wine.

I dug out the vino-o-meter and after a couple of false starts worked out how to get a reading. Yes, I had proof – and Proof. I was back in the winemaking business.

I have just returned from the bathroom where, after much siphoning (during which accidentally swallowed a certain amount of the stuff – hopefully it will grow on me) and a third round of sugar, I snuggled my precious demi-john back into its airing cupboard. It promptly rewarded me with a couple of loud, satisfied belches. I couldn’t be prouder.

One last thing. I said I had proof. In fact, according to the vino-o-meter, I have a whopping 17 per cent Proof. And it’s still fermenting….

Gentle reader, could it be that I am now making blackberry liqueur?

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I have been following, and more recently deviating (probably disastrously) from, the blackberry wine recipe appearing at http://www.familyherbalremedies.com/blackberry_wine_recipe

Stephen Buhner's recipe is beautifully and reassuringly written, and any shortcoming in my own efforts at wine production is entirely due to operator error and failure to follow instructions
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Postscript:
What did the grape say when it was crushed? Nothing, it just gave a little wine....